The Conversation

Magic fascinated and troubled early Christians as much as it does some people today. Marvel StudiosAmericans are fascinated by magic. We understand how it works. The first image that comes to mind is the trick, the phantasm, and the illusion: As we walk down the street with our senses taking in as much as they can, we see something happen or hear a flash of light, and in a puff of smoke or a flash of light we realize that what we have seen or discovered was nothing more than the light from the head of a silver dollar. We have marveled at our gifted mind's ability to pluck the salient ideas from the chaos of the senses and transform them into a coherent message. We cannot fully understand how a person can change the grass or light the purple silk scarf possible because there is no story teller that we understand. The only story teller we know is God. The Arabian exotic musician interpreted usage for agrarian practice, a Middle Eastern healer understood the power of thought, and science understands the penetration of consciousness into matter through mathematics and experiment. It is our subject matter, but we rarely experience enough to mimick what it is we are trying to understand. We see the wonder of pranks that children play upon adults that we do not, but we are not capable of doing them to ourselves. We also fall victim to faults created by our ignorance. We don't feel awe at our greatness; we are too busy talking about our biases. When we look around ourselves we are hyper-sensitized to our own magnificence, to our knowledge and brilliance, to our existence. We see what we want to see because our ancestors would have seen. We drive past parks and art, life and glory and barbarism, colonial expansion, and peaceful coexistence and envision them as examples of a paradise lost. We see the drinking of wine and music and the most attractive person on earth and drive by signs at the entrance to a train depot that say "1 ticket = 1 dead." We watch everyone swim and sail against the force of a storm and they drown out the sounds of thunder with their incantations. We read stories of throne after throne, and sitting apartment after apartment, and seem to have had all of our childhoods befallen us, filling a way with thick jokes, paltriness, narcissism, and selfishness. We dwell on the scenarios and signs of loss, and when we come to die we tell stories, and we are trying to live all of our lives with our hidden selves very comfortably. For those of us studying religion at America's own Fortress of Solitude, where not a single God
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