Do you believe in Black Magic?

[yaboy]

I believe in creating voodoo dolls, grabbing some pins and making your life hell monkey island style.

thats black magic isnt it?

muwhahaha

 

[Mr.Clark]

Magic ..... no .....

But if something is unexplainable, (and isn't being done by the freaks and nutters), then I would refer to Clarke's third law :

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

True, but you do have to wonder where that technology came from...

 

[Bakedgoods]

Some people just clearly can't tell the difference between fact and fiction.

 

[Dolph]

Yes, but I can't see how any rational human being can believe in the claims made by religion, but they do.

But rationality is dependant on the individual's perceptions and beliefs. Someone can rationally believe in religious claims based on their experiences.

All that is required for an action to be rational is that if one believes action X (which can be done) implies Y, and that Y is desirable, he or she does X. The action would likewise be avoided were Y undesirable. Such arguments are logically valid but not necessarily logically sound. For example, the premise "If I close the window I will not be cold..." may in fact be incorrect. As making formally sound argument is generally considered difficult, the "soundness" or "strength" of such premises will often rest on induction, statistics, and simplified heuristical models.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationality

I don't believe in black magic, white magic, pink magic, god magic or any other sort of magic.

Maybe that's why I like Derren Brown - he does all this cool stuff, people go "oh, magic", and he replies "nah, it's a trick. Look..."

Derren Brown is the skeptic's most haunted, it's sad to see people taking him as anything more than entertainment, just as it's sad to see people taking most haunted seriously. He aims for a target audience and structures his show around things they want to see...

 

[Monkey Puzzle]

This is one of the key points that is likely to be missed by most. A wiccan spell, for example, is basically a form of prayer, using your faith (and the diety involved) to affect change in your enviroment. I have seen the effects of such things, to the point where the odds of coincidence become very large, but that doesn't mean I can offer an explaination for how or why it works. I have my own beliefs about it, but that's not really offering any explaination.

Can you give some details of what effects you've seen, and how exactly they've defied the odds?