Talk:Magic and religion
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I have removed the following:
- In no case can either Wicca, or NeoPaganism be correctly identified with Satanism, which owes its structure and memes primarily to inversions of monotheistic texts.
as it is entirely POV in regards to Satanism. ArtsyF3ck
I remnoved the following sentence from the article:
- Examples of the suppression of magical belief and practice range from the eradication of neighboring polytheistic tribes by the early Hebrews
There are three reasons that I removed this: (A) the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) does not state that practioners of magic must be exterminated, anywhere. It does say that certain pagan tribes, which it described as heinously immoral, should be wiped out....but... (B) Although the Tanakh starts out by saying that the Israelites waged a war which wipied out certain pagan tribes, the later books of this same Bible admit that these tribes never were wiped out. According to the Bible, the extermination never occured. (C) Modern historical studies deny that the Israelites came into the land of Canaan as a large army and wiped out all these tribes. So the claim has no support. RK
- Although the Tanakh starts out by saying that the Israelites waged a war which wipied out certain pagan tribes, the later books of this same Bible admit that these tribes never were wiped out. According to the Bible, the extermination never occured. What you seem to be saying is that according to the Bible, the extermination both did and did not occur. That is, the larger work "the Tanakh" includes both claims. Is there any reason to prefer your interpretation (that the "earlier" parts of the Bible assert exterminations which did not happen, and "later" ones correct this) over the obvious contrary (that "earlier" parts of the Bible correctly describe exterminations which "later" authors wished to deny ever happened)? --FOo
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- The Torah (first five books of the Bible) uses rhetorical devices such as exagerration on many subjects, not just on this one. For example, consider the obvious exageration that some 600,000 adult males (implying a total population of about 2 million Israelites) left Egypt and entered the land of Canaan. We know now that this massive exodus could not have happened; the population of Canaan at this time was about 50,000, and didn't greatly increase during this time. (A smaller exodus, however, certainly could have taken place, and I believe did take place.) Most historians now agree that the Hebrew Bible is not very good history, and probably was never intended for this purpose (i.e. serious history as we know it today) to begin with. RK
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- Your suggestion that later authors wish to deny certain facts is incorrect. Later biblical authors just reported something a bit more accurate. When you live among the pagan tribes of Canaan, it is hard to claim that they don't exist, because they were all wiped out! We cannot make historical claims based on a few sentences in the Torah (i.e. that the Israelites exterminated certain native pagan tribes of Canaan) and ignore the rest of the Bible (which admits that the extermination didn't occur), and ignore the other archaelogical evidence. Check out the Anchor Bible commentary (Doubleday), or any other critical historical studies of these books; they will blow your mind. By the way, this is not to say that everything in the Bible is false, either. See The Bible and history for more on this topic. RK
"However this view is an ethnocentric one". This statement is totally POV.
I was very pleased to see the redirect to Magic (paranormal) removed, and I don't have any strong objections to the modifications that are now being made to Magic (religion), at least not at this time. Rather, I just did a cut and paste of a previous version of this article that seemed to capture the essence of what the Magic (religion) article was before the redirect was established to Magic (paranormal). However, I must say that magical beliefs and practices are part and parcel of monotheistic religions, notwithstanding the fact that monotheism often associates magical practices with "evildoers." On this note, any extended discussion of black magic in the context of monotheism should probably be moved to the article on Witchcraft. -- NetEsq 17:35 Mar 18, 2003 (UTC)
More kudos! Renaming the article from Magic (religion) to Magic and religion put this article into its proper context, i.e., the anthropology of religion. -- NetEsq 01:00 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)
The section called Related religious practices is a bit flaky, especially in the phony analysis of how "ritual" differs. "Related" according to whom? certainly not religious people. Mkmcconn 05:20, 26 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I would simply like to point out at the moment that not all researchers in this particular field agree that magic is a notion that can be dubbed universal that easily; a main caveat is that we should not use our own 21st century preconceptions on the matter to dub anything that would appear as affecting reality through paranormal means as magic; e.g. singing a sort of prayer over a wound, so that it would heal, was standard medical practice in classical Athens (ca 5th cent BC) that was by no means to be ommitted by the physician tending said wound; but then again we have the hippocratic "on the Sacred Disease" which is in part a polemic against people professing to be able to cure not through medicine, but through magical means, such as spells and incantations; yet Hippocrates does not condemn the singing over the wound I just mentioned, he probably did it himself.
The opinion of certain influential reasearchers on the matter (e.g. Dickie "Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World" (2001), or Graf "Gottesnaehe und Schadenzauber" (1996)) is roughly that "magic" as a category of thought evolved in a Greek environment at ca 5th cent. BC. What really constitutes magic is an array of mainly foreign religious practices that are not endorsed by state religion and are thus regarded as unclean. The terms also used to describe a sorcerer are terms of abuse (magos, pharmakos, etc), and calling someone a sorcerer is a grave insult. So in a nutshell the fundamental difference between religion and magic is that magicians indulge themselves in unclean religious practices, whereas pious individuals have nothing to do with sorcerers and practise accepted ceremonies. If we follow this train of thought we will be hard pressed to term, say, shamanistic practices as magic.
I am not taking a firm position on the matter, as I have a lot of study to do yet on it; but I would like this post to serve as a caveat for those interested that we should not apply our rationalist prejudices on ancient "irrational" matters like magic, but we should try to think more like the actual people of the era that a particular notion is first applied. Lucius Domitius 22:06, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Recent Rewrite
This article reads like an essay. Heck, even if sources were found, this entire article should have "in the minds of some modern pagans" or the like prefacing it. Now, don't get me wrong, normally beliefs, correct or false, are worthy of being reported on- hence all the fun articles on Norse mythology and certain modern religions of dubious legitimacy. But some very strong statements are simply asserted here as fact. The assumption seems to be that there's "true" magic, and then evil religion stamping it out (so too were shamans and adepts devolved into priests and a priestly caste.). Plus, apparently monotheism is locked into some kind of intractable battle with magic (maaaaaybe you can say that about Abrahamic religions, but "monotheism" is way too wide a net).
I tried to talk about magic in the context of all religions, not merely paganism as the old article was. Sadly, I don't know so much about many Eastern religions; if anyone can put in more details on Buddhism and Shinto and the like, that'd be great. SnowFire 18:19, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] 83.141.103.162's edit.
I don't see what was gained by having lots of tiny paragraphs; the intent of the original grouping was to trace "standard" sacrifice through history, then trace human sacrifice and attitudes. That's lost by making each stand alone.
Anyway, I worked in the comments on Asatru and the like, but I left one comment out:
- In Nigeria human sacrifice with the belief of good fortune and wealth is return is a form of common black magick.
First off, the grammar is off here, as this sentence doesn't entirely make sense (I assume you mean "returned", but even then, it isn't well-written). Secondly, this is a really strong claim- human sacrifice is common? If this is true, then at least link to another Wikipedia article on it, even if you can't source it. Strong claims require sources.
(By the way, I do have some sources on the cite request for the moloch, but sadly, the moloch article has suffered some linkrot. I'll see if I can dig up the names of the historians who commented that, but really, it's not exactly a leap if you accept the moloch theory in the first place, which is the disputed part.) SnowFire 16:09, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
