In Seminary, while pursuing my degree in cross cultural dynamics I did a course work and a good deal of reading on the idea of magic. At that time I thought we were headed for the mission field and being familiar with how culture worked was a natural fit. Most of the reading and study I did on magic was as sat in the context of third world pre-modern cultures. We looked at the idea of totems, charms, spirit-animals, grimoire, shamans, and everything in between. As it turned out Jane and I didn’t end up on the mission field (not for lack of trying) but oddly enough all that work studying magic and cross-culture contexts ended up being instrumental for understanding culture in modern and post-modern contexts right here in the USA.
When one strips all the mysticism and spooky context from the idea of the magical one is left with the reality that Magic, by definition, is the attempt to manipulate one’s surrounding by means of gaining control of the cultural context. In a pre-modern context magic is about manipulating the false gods (the supernatural) so as to put them in the magicians service. Magic thus is a way of gaining power over every circumstance that one encounters. Magic works to put the gods in the service of the one who knows the keys to manipulating the supernatural forces that guide the universe. In magic the practitioner is the one who is controlling the controllers (supernatural).
Now in a third world pre-modern context that means gaining control by means of manipulating the gods. However in a modern context magic still gains traction even though the concept of supernatural is diminished and/or dismissed. Because the gods don’t go away, even if they no longer exist in a pre-modern animistic setting, magic still is a thing. However, the adjustment one needs to make in applying the idea of the use of magic manipulating the gods in a third world setting is to understand that while magic might look different in a modern/post-modern world magic is still practiced in leverage against the gods. The secret was translating the gods of animism to the gods of in the post-modern world. Now, unlike a animistic setting where the supernatural is everywhere and the gods are thick as flies the modern/post-modern world, having denied god, has merely rearranged the deck chairs of divinity so as to find the supernatural as being controlled by the new God in town — sovereign Man. Once one understands that one begins to see that magic, as a means of establishing total control over the world, other men, and the “supernatural” via manipulation of reality in one’s favor is still a thing with the difference that the shaman, witch-doctor, and sorcerer translated into modern/post-modern culture is now called the sociologist, the marketer, the psychologist, and the propagandist. If you pause to consider it, it is easy to see that these categories of people are to us today in the modern world what the magician was to the animistic world.
Secondly, wherein “primitive” cultures it is the gods who are manipulated in modern/post-modern culture it is man as god that is controlled and manipulated by our new forms of magic. And sociology, psychology, propaganda, and marketing are the means by which man the controller magician has established manipulative control over man as god. Modern man as magician uses these forms of magic to control man as god just as the Shaman in animistic cultures used magic to control men.
You see the difference is that in the world of animism the magician worked on the supernatural to control it to his ends, whereas today in the Western world the magician works on the natural that has taken the place of what the gods were to the animistic world. In the third-world the Magician resorts to reading entrails, casting bones, chanting spells, and making potions. In today’s modern/postmodern world the Magician is more likely to read statistics, cast marketing reports, chant psychological gibberish, and map simple ways, via propaganda to get people to act the way you want them to act. However, in the end it is all about controlling people via controlling the gods. It’s all magic.
Scientism is a sub-category of modern magic as well. Scientism is used as a magic to control and manipulate modern man. This was most recently clearly seen in the whole Covid fiasco – disaster. Scientism, aided by propaganda, sociology, and psychology worked the work of magic by the magicians to control mass man. There was no reality there. It was all “magic.” It was all manipulation and control of god — of modern man. Looking back, who could ever doubt the control of the magicians? It was breathtaking to see how they used their magic spells to control the world’s population. The greatest sorcerers of all time (Merlin? Allanon? Bremen?) would be envious of the magic cast by the Covid magicians of the 21st century.
A troubling thing happened at the tail end of the 20th century and that the kind of magic spoken of above came into the Christian Church via Fuller Seminary’s “Church Growth Movement.” Lead by the likes of Donald McGavern, C. Peter Wagner, Allen Tippet and then taken up by the likes of Rick Warren, Lyle Schaller, and Bill Hybels magic was brought into the Christian Church and has not waned since its introduction. The Church growth movement was all about sociology, psychology, propaganda, and marketing. It was the magic movement coming into the last place magic should have been seen. People were “converted” by means of this magic but like all magic the spell wore off for a considerable portion of these people. Hybels went down in a sex scandal. Warren became connected to the CFR. Wagner went off the Pentecostal edge with the Vineyard movement. However it ended each of these people and many others introduced magic into the Church.
In Seminary we had to study how marketing plans could build the church. We had to take humanist psychology dressed up as Christian, we had to take a whole semester class in Church Growth techniques. (Somewhere around here I still have my Donald McGavern and C. Peter Wagner books.) We had to understand how sociology could direct people’s affections. They were all magic courses.
And now one can barely function as a church apart from the operation of magic over the congregation. Indeed, Pastors have become known more for their marketing skills or psychology counseling skills than for their understanding of reality because of familiarity with God’s Word. It is not too much to say that magic has turned the Pastorate into a Shaman or Witch Doctor. Pastors are expected, as one Pastor told me years ago, “to put the meat in the seat.” That is to be accomplished via the control that comes from rightly handling the magic. Because this is so our churches are burgeoning with people who are not converted but instead have had a successful magical spell cast upon them. Some form of modern magic (sociology, psychology, marketing, scientism, propaganda) has gripped them and holds them in congregations. Much like a voodoo doll in ancient magic would find it controlling the person who it represents so much of the modern church controls its members via magic and sociological manipulation.
Understand that the sociology, marketing, propaganda, and psychology used by the modern church is manipulation by means of modernist notions of magic. Modern magic manipulates reality by convincing people of realities that are not real. Just as the magic of Covid created a reality that dictated that poisonous vaccines were a cure, that masks stopped disease, that social distancing made one whit of difference so the modern magic of the Church creates a reality where the awe of God is lost in worship, where the law is no longer proclaimed, where egalitarianism is a spell that is cast over the congregants, where the Pastor is Shaman.
It’s all magic folks, and you need to wake up from the spell that has been cast.
I am curious why you say there was no reality with COVID-19. Are you denying all aspects of COVID-19 and the response? Do you believe COVID-19 is a made up disease caused by a made up virus? Do you believe the people who got sick (some of whom died) from the SARS-CoV-2 virus were not really sick? Do you believe masks do not filter out airborne pathogens? Do you believe airborne pathogens do not exist? The list goes on…
If you want to argue about the correct actions to take in response to the pandemic, there is leeway since there are pros and cons to the decisions made. However, there was a real pandemic and there are concrete ways to mitigate the spread of an airborne pathogen that come at varying levels of cost. To say there was no reality, though, is absurd.
Hello Scott
Thanks for the questions.
What I mean is that Covid was not what it was sold to us as. It certainly existed but it was a man-made pandemic that did not require the ridiculous steps that were implemented. Masks were a control mechanism and were never retardants for catching the disease.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/face-masks-difference-spread-covid-scientific-review
COVID was ignorance purposefully created and energized by a will to gin up a hysterical response so that the State could control their populations. It was a salvo launched by those interested in creating a New World Order.
The virus was real… augmented in various labs across the world and weaponized at Fauci’s connivance. So, yes, it was made up in the sense that it was weaponized. There would have been no COVID if it had not been for the existence of the WHO, NIH and the CDC. The PCR tests were the equivalent of the practice of bleeding someone because they were sick practiced during the Middle Ages. The inventor of the PCR test himself said that the test was never intended to do what they were using it for. It was a JOKE.
People clearly died, but the lion’s share who died were either folks w/ co-morbidities or were killed by the protocol (remdesivir & ventilators) followed in the hospitals. The death rate was also purposefully driven up by placing Covid patients in nursing homes as well as by the refusal to sanction medicines like Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The subsequent deaths from the poisonous vaccines certainly will cause, in the end, a far far greater number of deaths than Covid-19. (Though nobody in an official capacity will admit it.)
I suggest you read the following should you doubt me;
The Truth About COVID-19: Exposing The Great Reset, Lockdowns, Vaccine Passports, and the New Normal — Joseph Mercola
Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health — RFK Jr.
“Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 — Ed Dowd
I don’t think you’re informed enough on this matter to be calling anyone “absurd.”
Thanks for dropping by.
Follow up question:
The Fox News article referenced a paper purporting no appreciable effect due to mask use. I will now provide you with a paper purporting a noticeable reduction in COVID-19 infection due to mask use. How do you handle the difference?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10760436/
For ease of reference, here is a link to the paper from the Fox News article:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9885521/
How do I handle the difference?
That’s easy. I put no stock at all in the Leftist NIH.
See this study;
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-research-finds-little-to-no-evidence-masks-effectively-lessened-covid-spread/
Look, Scott, I don’t trust the expert cult. The problem with Science is that it isn’t particularly scientific.
Cheers,
You previously sent me to a Fox News article which referenced the paper in my second link, a link that also goes to the NIH website, which I think should have made you a bit cautious about dismissing the other paper by saying you don’t put stock in the NIH. As it turns out, neither paper was published by the NIH. You can find links to the original publishers on the NIH website, not that it matters much who published the papers, the papers should be judged based on their own merit.
Curiously, you have sent me a link to an article from the National Review which in turn links to a paper I have already seen because it is the very same paper the Fox News article mentioned, hence, also the very same paper I have already linked to in my post. I suspect you have not read the paper. Honestly, not that much of a problem here since the news articles represented the paper fairly well (not always the case).
“The problem with Science is that it isn’t particularly scientific.”
Regarding science not being particularly scientific, I think that depends on what discipline you are looking at. At its most basic level, the scientific method is performing an experiment, then performing the same experiment again with a single variable changed – thus any change is attributed to that changed variable. In laboratory settings, we can often design experiments to test a single variable. However, when it comes to the various population studies regarding masks, many variables could not be held constant. Hence, the data was flawed and the masks could not be entirely isolated for causal effect. Still, you did twice send me to one of these flawed papers, so I am not sure I am hitting at the same thing you are.
Hi Scott,
We are clearly not going to come to a consensus here.
1.) Whether the NIH published them or only posted them, given my lack of trust in the NIH I don’t / won’t be taking them particularly seriously.
2.) Papers should NOT be adjudicated on their own merits apart from understanding the bias that they are bringing to their study. This goes to what I think I said earlier about Science not being particularly scientific but worldview driven. I don’t accept the philosophical premises of empiricism that Science rests on. I do not believe that “Science is the Queen of the Sciences.” I do not believe in Scientism. I do not believe in the “cult of the experts.” And the books and links I provided previously demonstrates why people are foolish who do not join me in not automatically “trusting the science.” After all, it was Fauci who at one point said… “I am the Science.” Do we really still believe that Fauci (as just one example) is THE SCIENCE.
3.) Yes, Scott, I know that it is allegedly the case that science = experimentation + observation. I think I got that down in 3rd grade. But what I am telling you is that it is not as simple as that, and that even at “its most basic level.”
Again… all I can do is recommend to you books by Popper, Kuhn, Poythress and others that have demonstrated that Scientism is ridiculous and that science is much more that experimentation and observation. Requiring masks was part of the ridiculous escaped that we were just on.
From an Oxford Epidemiologist from 2023.
The most rigorous and comprehensive analysis of scientific studies conducted on the efficacy of masks for reducing the spread of respiratory illnesses — including Covid-19 — was published late last month. Its conclusions, said Tom Jefferson, the Oxford epidemiologist who is its lead author, were unambiguous.
“There is just no evidence that they” — masks — “make any difference,” he told the journalist Maryanne Demasi. “Full stop.”
But, wait, hold on. What about N-95 masks, as opposed to lower-quality surgical or cloth masks?
“Makes no difference — none of it,” said Jefferson.
What about the studies that initially persuaded policymakers to impose mask mandates?
“They were convinced by nonrandomized studies, flawed observational studies.”
Finally, Scott, if we have gotten to the point where Ivy League Ph.D. students are teaching that 2 + 2 can = 5 then I am pretty confident that all disciplines have been compromised by the myth of Science (and Math).
https://beunbound.us/blog/harvard-two-plus-two-equals-five-kareem-carr/
Remember also it is hard sciences like biology, and paleontology where some of the most silly “science” is done.
Look, I’m pretty confident that because of our differing Worldviews we are just not going to agree on this matter about Science. So, we agree to have our different conclusions, think the other one bonkers, and move on with life.
But not while wearing a mask.
Cheers
Hello Scott;
Just a bit more to throw in the hopper on this subject;
Dr. Simon Goddek
@goddeketal
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2h
HOW THEY CREATED THE FAKE PANDEMIC
1. China released staged footage of people “dropping dead” in the streets: scenes never seen anywhere else in the world prior and after December 2019.
2. A PCR test was introduced that didn’t determine if someone was actually sick. Almost all results were false positives.
3. They pushed the lie of asymptomatic transmission to justify restrictions on healthy people and mass testing the whole world.
4. Tech companies and media outlets were mobilized to censor dissent and label truth as “misinformation.”
5. Behavioral psychologists were used to craft fear-based messaging and manipulate public compliance.
6. To maintain the illusion of a deadly pandemic, they needed excess mortality data.
7. Since mild cold symptoms wouldn’t deliver that, they terrorized the global population to trigger a mass psychogenic illness.
8. Constant fearmongering led to chronically elevated cortisol levels, weakening immune systems, especially among the elderly.
9. Social isolation, medical neglect, and lockdowns caused the excess deaths they needed to support the narrative.
10. They suddenly claimed masks worked, something no serious authority had ever recommended before for respiratory pathogens, turning every face into a walking billboard for fear.
11. People were gaslit into staying home “until the vaccine was ready,” giving authorities more time to expand control.
12. They injected billions with an experimental product, claiming it would prevent infection and transmission.
13. When that failed, they moved the goalposts: “If the unvaccinated don’t get the shot, your shot won’t work.”
14. They invented new “variants” every few months to justify never-ending booster campaigns.
15. They fabricated a new condition, “long COVID,” to cover up the mounting side effects of the injections.
16. Pharmaceutical giants made record profits, protected by government contracts and zero liability.
17. Those who spoke out were silenced, banned, investigated, or publicly discredited.
18. And once the narrative became too absurd to sustain, they abruptly declared the pandemic over, and pretended none of it had ever happened.