Is Witchcraft Rational?
Is Witchcraft Rational?
Human nature has always instigated us to try and look for explanations for what happens around us. Psychology looks for the explanations for human behavior, meteorology looks for explanations for weather and the police now look for scientific explanations to solve a crime. The means we have today to investigate cause and effect are different from how they were even a decade ago let alone in the ancient civilizations when witchcraft and magic supposedly originated, not to mention that there are still tribes and peoples who live by the old traditions.
People who strongly believe in witchcraft will explain any negative events saying that witchcraft was at play, that someone was bewitched or cursed. Such is the case …show more content…
To me rational is what I can explain with what I know and irrational is what I can't explain with what I know. I know through some physics I studied that sound waves have a long wavelength and can therefore bend around corners and light can't for the opposite reason. That is science and I knew it yesterday and today and it won't change tomorrow. My knowledge about other things though will change as I learn new things every day. I can now understand someone's behavior a year ago, which at the time I thought to be irrational, because now I've been told their reasons for it. So what is rational to each and every one of use is likely to change as we gather new knowledge of the world around us. Furthermore, since we do not all possess the same knowledge, what is rational is likely to be different for every person. So a more general definition would have to account for all these different variables. When I asked a friend to help me come up with a general definition she said "rational is reasonable within its own context". I stopped looking for a better definition after that because it pretty much covers every loophole I could think of. When I was a child I used to think that little rats in the wheels of a car were running to make the car move and to me that was a rational explanation. Then I grew, I started learning how a car works so the context, for me, changed. What I'm …show more content…
In the Roman Catholic Church we pray. We pray before a job interview or an exam so that god may help us do well, we pray for a friend who terminally sick that god may aid in her recovery and some people actually believe that praying is effective. My mother leads a group of people to place called Borg in-Nadur in Birzebbugia where this guy says the Virgin Mary appears to him every Wednesday and tells him to say the rosary so that people stop doing evil and convert. So even nowadays the concept that one can perform some sort of ritual that manipulates the future or other people's actions is still strong and not in some remote place practiced by primitive natives but in the middle of our towns by educated
Human nature has always instigated us to try and look for explanations for what happens around us. Psychology looks for the explanations for human behavior, meteorology looks for explanations for weather and the police now look for scientific explanations to solve a crime. The means we have today to investigate cause and effect are different from how they were even a decade ago let alone in the ancient civilizations when witchcraft and magic supposedly originated, not to mention that there are still tribes and peoples who live by the old traditions.
People who strongly believe in witchcraft will explain any negative events saying that witchcraft was at play, that someone was bewitched or cursed. Such is the case …show more content…
To me rational is what I can explain with what I know and irrational is what I can't explain with what I know. I know through some physics I studied that sound waves have a long wavelength and can therefore bend around corners and light can't for the opposite reason. That is science and I knew it yesterday and today and it won't change tomorrow. My knowledge about other things though will change as I learn new things every day. I can now understand someone's behavior a year ago, which at the time I thought to be irrational, because now I've been told their reasons for it. So what is rational to each and every one of use is likely to change as we gather new knowledge of the world around us. Furthermore, since we do not all possess the same knowledge, what is rational is likely to be different for every person. So a more general definition would have to account for all these different variables. When I asked a friend to help me come up with a general definition she said "rational is reasonable within its own context". I stopped looking for a better definition after that because it pretty much covers every loophole I could think of. When I was a child I used to think that little rats in the wheels of a car were running to make the car move and to me that was a rational explanation. Then I grew, I started learning how a car works so the context, for me, changed. What I'm …show more content…
In the Roman Catholic Church we pray. We pray before a job interview or an exam so that god may help us do well, we pray for a friend who terminally sick that god may aid in her recovery and some people actually believe that praying is effective. My mother leads a group of people to place called Borg in-Nadur in Birzebbugia where this guy says the Virgin Mary appears to him every Wednesday and tells him to say the rosary so that people stop doing evil and convert. So even nowadays the concept that one can perform some sort of ritual that manipulates the future or other people's actions is still strong and not in some remote place practiced by primitive natives but in the middle of our towns by educated