Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

I have come to realize that my deeply intuitive belief in magic, so continuously active as a vivid theme in my dreams and creative reveries, is less an escape mechanism from an unfulfilled life than it is an escape POD I am using to eject myself from this crashing burning spacestation we know as 21st century Western Civilization.

“If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic.”― Tom Robbins

Humans are fond of imagining higher beings as being 2-dimensional storybook characters. Like with angels or demons or God or even aliens, they like to pigeonhole them as either good or evil, which is unlikely to be the case at all. The more advanced the beings the less they will belong to "team good" or "team evil"--the light and dark sides of the Force so to speak. They will be like us, full of complex attributes and purposes and feelings and depending upon their own individual choices and preferences just like we are. The Greek and Roman gods are examples of basically amoral superbeings. The Islamic concept of the djinn are of powerful supernatural beings (creatures of the smokeless flame) who are as amoral and free-willed as humans. Fairies and elementals and nature spirits also have their good and bad sides.

Yep, primitive peoples dream up primitive gods, demons, etc.. This is why Greek and Roman gods all had very human flaws and motivations. But as humans developed, their conception of these things also developed. Just like primitive and barbaric humans developed civilization and more large-scale peaceful cooperation, so do their conceptions of higher beings develop in positive ways. It's that positive progress that is idealized in higher beings.

Assuming everything develops toward the amoral says a lot about one's idea of progress.

Do park benches have afterlives?

I sit here on this cold damp park bench. Not just any old park bench, but THIS park bench. It looks and feels just like all park benches. But that is just my feeble mortal point of view. I do not know what makes this park bench alone and for all time THIS park bench. Its peculiar thisness presents an unfathomable mystery to me. I only know it is precisely equal to its NOT being any of the near infinite number of thats that have existed nor will ever exist in the whole universe. And perhaps a bit more than that.

Down to its very sparkling quarks it is fundamentally unlike anything else, and it will live out its own years kindly seating the rears of thousands of tired and contemplative human beings like me before it is reduced to trash rubble and destroyed. That it was and that it is no more will hardly be noticed by anyone except for the observant few. But that it was a steadfast and comforting part of thousands of lives for so many years will always be so. Forever and ever amen.

Why are you dropping your political turds in my thread?

If you want your own private thread, post to a blog.
I posted literally creative and artful observations.

If dropping political turds is your version of creative writing and artful observations, you're worse off than I thought.

Anyone have a spare map of Pangea? I'm planning a roadtrip from Brazil to Nigeria.

---

To all of those who left so suddenly: what urgent business called you away from us, so important that it demanded the immediate abandonment of everything you have ever known and loved? What did you suddenly remember, that being alive for so long on this planet made you completely forget about?

(May 5, 2026 04:09 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]If dropping political turds is your version of creative writing and artful observations, you're worse off than I thought.

Klavan has had two of his novels made into movies and written for other movies and TV.
Far more creative than you.