Not if, as a believer, your operant conditioning and immersion in special pleading is such that you don't consider god's interventionism to be magic, but to be something else -- such as grace or miracles or whatever. Typical linguistic sleight-of-hand.

@mordant So you can believe in magic but not if you believe that the magic isn't magical but something else? Personally I like the Lord of the Rings Trilogy over the Bible, the magic seems more plausible.

@Surfpirate I'm not arguing it's not magic. I'm just explaining how believers deal with the resulting cognitive dissonance. In the same way, they think belief in unicorns or leprechauns is somehow qualitatively different from believing in an invisible man in the sky who dispenses rewards and punishments, or in the resurrection, or any of the miracles described in the Bible. Try to equate their magical beliefs with actual magic, or compare them to belief in legendary things they don't accept, and they will take great umbrage.

@RobWard Exactamundo! When the walls of the box crumble, the whole game changes. I think it's important for unbelievers (particularly those who aren't deconverts) to understand how this works for believers.

@mordant See I just like to simplify and lump magic and miracles together in a category that I like to call - BAT SHIT CRAZY. I don't care what colours the bat shit comes in because it's all crazy to me.

@Surfpirate Well that's your right and I certainly understand the impulse. However, courtesy of my first wife, who WAS "batshit crazy" (schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder) I do not toss that phrase around lightly myself. Believing in magic is wishful thinking, arguably delusional, and it is certainly uncritical and credulous rather than critical and skeptical. It leads to all kinds of dysfunction. However, even fundamentalists function well enough in society to hold down jobs and sometimes contribute in positive ways to the community. Once in awhile I've even met evangelicals who are kindly, pleasant people. I would call it "compartmentalized delusion", not literal "insanity".

The other problem with assigning stigmatic labels to people is that it dampens empathy and compassion and a focus on what we have in common, and contributes to the polarized environment we live in -- basically, lowering ourselves to the level of theists who claim we are "hateful", "arrogant", "licentious" and so forth. I don't want to gaslight them like they gaslight me.

Just a few thoughts for what they're worth. But ... I do understand what you're getting at. And sometimes the truth has to hurt. You do you. Just consider that words have meanings and we should be careful with them.

@mordant I get what you are saying, I just don't see why organized and socially sanctioned madness should be more acceptable than diagnosed mental illnesses which are outside the norm. My younger brother has schizophrenia as did his wife who shot herself in the head with her rifle 3 years ago, guess who flew across the country and bailed him out of that terrible situation before he followed her in the same manner? After I moved him back with me and helped him get reestablished the voices took exception to my helping him and making him feel weak and dependent so he tried to kill me. We haven't had much contact since then. I prefer to call things as I see them instead of dancing around the issue with a bunch of politically correct jargon, see a problem, address it is my preferred approach, anything less tends to be enabling.
Religious people believe in a sky daddy with a zombie son who will save those who subjugate themselves to him and torture for eternity those who refuse to bend a knee. How exactly is that different from the space aliens on their intergalactic council who have pressed my younger brother into service on alien worlds to fight their cosmic battles against their enemies? It isn't any different except that one is socially acceptable and one isn't - both are equally dangerous as history has clearly shown. If you find that arrogant and offensive then guess what? I'm good with that because it isn't my limitation it's yours - stop enabling.

@Surfpirate I agree that organizing a belief system and gaining social sanction for it doesn't make it right (or even less wrong). It doesn't necessarily make it lock-step equivalent to diagnosed mental illness either. Sometimes the greater harm is one, sometimes the other. Neither are positive.

And then there are the edge cases. My previous / late wife for example had an uncle and aunt who were devout rural Methodists but were almost the kindest and most selfless and giving people I've ever met. Do I call them crazy because they pray to an invisible man in the sky? I'm not inclined to. It's highly compartmentalized and constrained compared to general madness.

@mordant My brother can be the sweetest, kindest person you would ever hope to meet but when the bad voices are talking to him then he is a dangerous piece of work. Do I ignore the madness because of the kindness, the two are separate issues. Hate the sin and not the sinner as they say, whoever they are.

@Surfpirate The aunt and uncle are consistent. They don't occasionally threaten to murder people. I'm talking about people's overall reputation and demonstrated character and stability.

Trust me, after being married to someone who precipitated our divorce by standing over me in a trance-like state with a butcher knife one night as I slept ... I know what it is to recognize and value things in a loved one who is nevertheless dangerous, unstable and, well, crazy, and therefore, I am unable to continue the relationship. But not all disordered thinking is equally consequential or problematic.

@mordant We must have been married to the same woman, I woke up to my first wife with a carving knife in her hand in the middle of the night. I asked her what she was doing, she said "Nothing' and went back to the kitchen an put the knife away. Years later she tried to contract a hit on me through some business associates that were a bit shady. Crazy is crazy, I make no apologies for it, why do you?

@Surfpirate Lol -- well now I don't feel quite so unique in my acquaintance with crazy, so there's that.

I think we're not really that far apart, and for the sake of everyone else here I'm going to drop arguing about semantics and nuance. I would just point back to my final sentence in the previous reply: not all disordered thinking is equally consequential or problematic. I personally reserve "crazy" for butcher knife-level stuff. But ... if you want to apply it more broadly, that's your right.

@mordant It reminds me of the part of the NAMI course I took to help get a better handle on the issue I have with my brother's schizophrenia. They insisted that we should never say that he's schizophrenic but rather that he has schizophrenia as though that would make all the difference in the world, I say it is both because he has an illness and it defines him. The irony is that a classic symptom of schizophrenia is that the person with the illness believes there is nothing wrong with them, it's the rest of us who are crazy. We all have weights we have to bear, I just don't think that candy coating them makes them any easier to bear but that's me, to each their own but I do take exception to people who feel the weight is easier to bear if it isn't candy coated. That's not an arrogant position but a realistic one, delusions, everybody's got some. Have a great day and I hope things work out for you, your way.

@Surfpirate We must be brothers from another mother. My wife and I did a NAMI course too, mainly trying to help my son with his mental health issues that eventually killed him. We weren't that impressed with NAMI either. Considering the time invested we didn't take away much from it that we didn't already know as loving parents who know how to research stuff and be informed. In any case it didn't change the care delivery system, which is broken.

My son ended up in the county mental health system, with some drug pusher who had no respect for a personality disorder diagnosis and wanted to "manage" him chemically; to him, everything is depression; depression, per the party line, is 100% chemical imbalance; that was his hammer.

This fed my son's delusion that he didn't need to work on himself, he just needed a Magic Pill, he experimented off-label with all the meds he was given, and the rest is history. In the end no one contacted us to follow up on why my son wasn't showing up for appointments. Indeed, they found our desire as parents to be involved in his care to be annoying and inconvenient. So the NAMI approach of helping families cope and be supportive isn't much use in a system that is twenty years behind the times and still tends to assume the family is the problem. If there was one useful thing I did learn in that course, it's that until as recently as the 1990s, and still today for some caregivers, parents are the cause and the enemy.

Other than that insight -- I'd give the course a resounding "meh".

@mordant It is a complicated mess to be sure. If you have the money then you may get some help but even then it is at best 50/50.

That trick was done by magic mushrooms.

God made everything perfect, like weed too. Just not according to the federal Government standards.

Oooh, hark at you n your big words ?

@SimonCyrene

You can thank the Catholic Church for the word. You know what it means I presume.

@Ellatynemouth i struggle with words above two syllables (n the 2 syllable ones are mostly swear words ?)

@SimonCyrene

What is this conversation about?

@Ellatynemouth in Ireland we call it slagging ( the english refer to it as 'taking the piss' ?

@SimonCyrene

I wasn't sure. But I suspected you were taking the piss.

Thanks for clarifying.

I think the point is that the entire concept of a god IS magical. Just because they try to make a distinction between the two, doesn't mean there is a difference. Everything about their god is a fantasy of magic.

@pashaonenine Oh I agree the distinction is specious. I'm simply explaining a coping mechanism, not justifying it.

Lol! No "computer" coded as he describes adds up to 110, not 666. You'd think he'd at least be curious enough to check it out. This is a perfect example of how campfire stories spread; people are willing to embrace them based on credulous belief in the source.

I wondered if this was a corruption of adding up the ASCII values of the letters but that falls short also at 622. So clearly someone just made this up.

SMH ...

Props for citing The Lovin' Spoonful.