"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur Clarke It may be useful to rephrase this idea of religion as supernatural or ma

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" - Arthur Clarke It may be useful to rephrase this idea of religion as supernatural or magic, into something that's far more likely (though obviously not guaranteed) to be true or possible: it doesn't speak of magic, it speaks of technologies which we just aren't familiar with. Turning water into wine is cool, but I can sit in my American house and instantly enjoy a conversation with my friend in Japan. Somehow, only the former is "magic"... whether or not something is magic clearly has nothing to do with how absolutely complex it is, but rather how well you understand it. Well, I'm not sure anyone reading this actually has a "I could rebuild it" understanding of how the global cell phone system works (I certainly don't), so maybe it has nothing to do with understanding; its more to do with desensitization and ubiquity. Arthur didn't mean "all that technology around you is magic"; he meant: Envision what you think of as magic, as just potentially yet-uninvented technology. I don't read it as a statement about how advanced technology is or can be; I read it as a statement about how everything, including magic, can eventually be understood. Any sufficiently ubiquitous magic is indistinguishable from technology. God created the universe in seven days. In other words, we're living in a simulation, and it took them seven days to code it. More broadly, one side can argue that gays shouldn't marry, while the other says religion is a farce and science is the only path forward. If there's one thing humanity is great at, its taking it way too far. What if the third option is just to say, there's something more out there. Maybe you're being judged; maybe you're going to heaven, or maybe you're a simulated A/B test that isn't doing so hot.