On Wed, 7 May 1997, JD Farber wrote:

That's not magic.  Those are miracles done through the power of God.
Quite a different thing.

Not really.  And this is what I like about Mage.  It's all in how you choose
to percieve reality.  I could believe that this message is really being
written by very tiny electric spirits and then whisked away to be
distributed by more elcetric spirits.  Or I could believe that it is being
transfered into "1"s and "0"s and then sent off along a huge network of
phonelines.  Or maybe we all _ARE_ the computers and this is how we
communicate, and what ever else we do during the day isn't real.  Are any of
those wrong?  No, just lesser degrees of right.  Some of these may not
coincede with what you or I percieve reality to be, but that doesn't make
them wrong.

I refuse to believe in relative reality.  Either something is, or it
isn't.  Either something is true, or it isn't.  And as for magic, I'll
put it this way.  Christians would *not* agree that any miracles they
perform are magic.  And, being a Christian myself, I simply *know*
better.  ;)

Um, well...maybe not.  Man doesn't have the power within himself to cast
'magic spells'.  So, if miracles are by the power of God, take a quick
guess at where magic comes from.  ;)

Clarke's law: Any Technology, sufficently advanced, is indistiguishable from
Magick.  Magick is still here, we just choose not to see it.  If you want to
see magick, watch children play.  Watch their eyes when they play video
games.  They aren't sitting there controling the characters, they _ARE_ the
characters.  Man does have the power to make magick, he just loses it over
time, as he becomes more and more jaded.

Anything people can't explain via natural means, and refuse to accept
God's revealed truth about what *really* is the case, becomes "Magick"
in their eyes.  Nearly without fail.  *shrug*  But we digress.  ;)

Anyway, you write your story, I'll write mine.  I'm *going* to run with
this idea.  I'd prefer to pair up with another author with a head for
plots and complex storylines, but I can probably come up with a decent
plot on my own if hard-pressed.

There is a prayer in the book that I read every Friday night for the
Sabbath.  "Watch with a child's eye, and be amazed."  (I'm not
Jewish.  I'm Reformed Jewish.)

Ah.  Myself, I'm still amazed that people can look at, say, the origin
of languages, and say we got it from imitating animals, or from a need
to "socialize", or something else equally inane and unlikely.  Sorry
folks, languages *simplify* over time.  Just look at Chinese.  It used
to be polysyllabic and had a complex grammar.  Now it's monosyllabic and
with few (some might say zero) rules of grammar to speak of.  The less
advanced the culture, the less quickly their language tends to simplify
over time.  One of the Bantu languages spoken by primitives in Africa
has 26 different noun types.  26!  Romance languages, for comparison,
have three:  masculine, feminine, and neuter.  The Tower of Babel was
the way it happened, folks.

And my point is, these same people will look at a miracle of healing,
and call it magic.  *sigh*

Damon Casale, damoo@carmelnet.com
Spam, spam!  WONDERFUL spam!  ^_^