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The difference here is, that we now live in an mostly atheistic society, while back then magic, sorcery and gods were standard.
by hutzlibu 6y ago
The difference here is, that we now live in an mostly atheistic society, while back then magic, sorcery and gods were standard.
- tremon 6y agoBut how do we know it belonged to a sorceress and not, say, a doctor, or an oracle?
- hutzlibu 6y agoI think there was not much difference ... And those real doctors who did exist (Hippocrates did lived before that time), probably used real tools.
- colechristensen 6y agoWhat’s the difference between a sorcerer and a doctor?
- krapp 6y agoWhat's the difference between religion and science? Superstition and knowledge? Bias and evidence?
- colechristensen 6y agoAnd before anybody had come up with all of these bits about how to use formalized experimentation and reason to arrive at truth? You had people doing things based on intuition and whatever means of gaining and transmitting knowledge that there was at the time... “sorcery” is more of a modern pejorative for practices which haven’t or couldn’t be verified with modern methods... before modern methods you had people doing what they could to accomplish things... it wouldn’t occur to you to distinguish (and you couldn’t) between “magic” nonsense and “real” medicine. You got treated with plants and concoctions that had at least some basis in reason and experience, but there weren’t yet philosophies about how to reliably separate what was real and what worked from what was bogus. Modern medicine still has plenty of nonsense in it which might as well be sorcery.
- TchoBeer 6y agoBingo on the last sentence. So much of modern medicine has no theoretical basis and is just confirmed to work in tests, like "perform the incantation and the patient will recover."
- SyzygistSix 6y agoYep. Emergen-C is just a techno prayer, born from scientism.
- krapp 6y agoIt seems as if you're trying to argue that science is mostly sorcery and sorcery is mostly science - but all you're really saying is that science and sorcery can coexist, and that one can be confused for the other. This is obviously true, but that doesn't make them the same. "Sorcery" isn't a pejorative, any more than or "witchcraft" or "religious ritual." You could say that the ancient Assyrian magi from whom we get the word "magic" were doing a form of science when they kept track of the movements of the stars and the sun and moon, but when they used that knowledge to attempt to predict the future, they were doing sorcery.
- rsynnott 6y agoRoman medicine long, long predates scientific medicine, and was quite magic-oriented.
- lostlogin 6y ago> we now live in an mostly atheistic society Do we? Come election time all sorts of faith is professed - in cringeworthy form.
- hutzlibu 6y agoYeah, true. But if people openly say, they practice magic, they get laughed out of the room.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI know of at least a few psychics with storefronts in expensive places. Not everyone is laughing.
- SyzygistSix 6y agoThat depends on the room. Robert Anton Wilson was generally respected, as was William Burroughs. You could add Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Isaac Newton to the list.
- dhimes 6y agoAgree. As I said upthread, I'm sitting in Salem MA right now.