People who cannot reconcile a perfect god with a painful world have to spend endless hours trying to reconcile when the reason is obvious.
Its not. I never said any such thing.
I said it is wrong to equate theism with magical thinking. They are not the same thing. The God one believes isnāt necessarily a magical God, and I have always opposed magical interpretations of scripture and magical understandings of God and miracles ā i.e. doing anything which is contrary to the laws of nature.
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That is a pretty good example of magical thinking or is there some causal mechanism behind this error leakage? I suspect it is only your worldview which supports your claim. Would your worldview likewise result necessarily in error if you worked in science?
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How ate your first two lines anything but.
āMagical thinkingā¦also atheistsā¦for thimkingā.
Religion, " god " is about the supernatural,
unless one wishes to go deep into equivocation
and abandon mdaning in words.
Magical thinking required.
Ah, a mistypo on my part. " does NOT"
We suspect you did not read on to see
the next line, deleted in your post why ?
How about including it now so its clear i
didnt mean what you claim.
Because of being raised by two psychology majors I have understood what magical thinking was from early childhood. Other people havenāt quite mastered the concept possibly because they are too busy grasping for rhetoric to prop up their ideological world view.
magical thinking , the belief that oneās ideas, thoughts, actions, words, or use of symbols can influence the course of events in the material world. Magical thinking presumes a causal link between oneās inner, personal experience and the external physical world. Encyclopedia Britannica
Hmmmā¦ a parenthetical should be added after ācausal linkā which says āapart from the actions of the person (with this inner personal experience) affecting those events.ā
Magical thinking, or superstitious thinking, is the belief that unrelated events are causally connected despite the absence of any plausible causal link between them Wikipedia
Magical thinking is defined as believing that one event happens as a result of another without a plausible link of causation. Psychology Today
This has nothing whatsoever to do with believing in God or in believing that there is more to reality than what the methods of science can discover. Naturalism (equating reality to the scientific worldview) is NOT the antonym of āmagical thinking.ā One can indulge in magical thinking regardless of whether one believes in God or gods or not, or even whether one buys into the ideology of naturalism. One of the key issues with God is whether you believe God accomplishes things by magic (will alone) or by rational method, ability, and know how ā the dreamer god versus the creator God.
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So you can believe in God, but not pray.
Obviously. Many many people believe in God but do not pray.
But does not follow that if you do pray you are indulging in magical thinking for a number of reasons.
- At the very least it would depend on the content of your prayers. For a lot of people, prayer is about having a conversation with God which is nothing to do with magical thinking.
- And even if you do pray for things, it doesnāt mean that you think you will automatically get those things apart from your own actions and natural physical causes. Most religious people I have talked to do not think in this manner.
- One can even believe God acts in the world without believing that God in any way suspends the laws of nature.
Basicaly, its believe but if you pray you are getting into magic.
Magic words
Ftm, belief in magical powers seems real close to magical thinking.
What psych term would you apply if not " magical thinking"
Perhaps this is a discussion you should have with a psychiatrist. Ask them how they draw the line in discussions with their patients between prayer and magical thinking. But I suspect it is something like the followingā¦
- compulsively turning to prayer while doing none of the things obviously needed for accomplishing what they want to happen.
- feelings of anger that the things they asked for in their prayers have not happened.
In other words, it is only magical thinking if you believe prayer accomplishes things apart from your own actions directly connected to the events you are seeking to influence (i.e. if you think prayer is sufficient). The point here is not that the religious do not indulge in magical thinking. Obviously many of them do. As do many people who are not religious, frankly. The point is that there is nothing logically necessitating that theists or religious people indulge in magical thinking.
I think the problem is that many atheists cannot see a point in believing in God unless this has some utility. But that is precisely where I think people should not believe in God. For theists this means that God is not someone you can use and if you are thinking of God in that way then it is a false god. And for those atheists, this means they are limiting reality to what they can control and use, which is also unrealistic.
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Atheists limit reality to what they can use?
Many do that?
How did you get that info? Its a weird thing to think.
I doubt anyone prays, thinking it is useless.
From the way those particular atheists have evaluated the merits of believing in God in their discussions with me.
āUselessā is a different word with a more inclusive meaning than not being able to be used (especially when āuseā is conjoined with control).
Thatās in the strict theological sense of the word, of course. 
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Ok its down to semantics or equivocation.
To me, belief in magic- magical beings, magic results from
hand movements or words, is magical thinking.
If you have a better term, lets hear it.
Is it? I disagree but of course there are many believers who would agree with you. But looking at it objectively, all I see is people joined in a cultural, social relationship of a sort I do not. If there is anything supernatural going on, I canāt see it. So is religion about what we can see or what canāt be seen? Surely for you and I it can only be what we can see. There are any number of fundamentalists who will insist on the active presence of the supernatural in their lives, some on an every day basis. But if you hang around here long and objectively read what many here have to say about their faith youāll find much less insistence on certainty. There are always exceptions but part of being an objective observer is not stopping as soon as you find an instance that confirms your bias.
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Not my prayers.
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With magic, you are bending the will of the gods to your own. Repeat this, do this, and you will get that. That isnāt what prayer is usually about.
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So what is about exactly then?
I donāt understand your question.
Got it from opinion. Ok.
Make it " unusable then, but its down to distinctions sans diffrtence