{"id":1598,"date":"2010-01-20T15:04:29","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T23:04:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/?p=1598"},"modified":"2010-01-20T15:04:29","modified_gmt":"2010-01-20T23:04:29","slug":"more-materialistic-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/2010\/01\/20\/more-materialistic-magic\/","title":{"rendered":"More materialistic magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is great stuff. It reinforces what I wrote earlier<\/a> about the New Age movement being just another expression of selfish hedonism and materialism – not anything resembling a religious movement.<\/p>\n

In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were two closely allied manifestation of the development of a new post-Christian sense of human mastery over the world. There is nothing especially outrageous in such a claim. After all, magic is essentially a species of materialism; if it invokes any agencies beyond the visible sphere, they are not supernatural – n the theological sense of “transcendent” – but at most preternatural: they are merely, tat is to say, subtler, more potent aspects of the physical cosmos, the instrumental subjection of nature to humanity, and the constant increase of human power.<\/p>\n

Hence, there was not really any late modern triumph of science over magic, so much as there wa a ntural dissolution of the latter into the former, as the power of science to accomplish what magic could only adumbrate became progressively more obvious.<\/p>\n

-David Bently Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, p.82<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This also fits in nicely with my interest in how the post-enlightenment attraction to magic sees it as more of a “natural” phenomenon, a branch of science, than something that might actually interact with God and\/or REAL angels and demons. Science didn’t really conquer magic. It overshadowed it and consumed it, but the will of man didn’t change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is great stuff. It reinforces what I wrote earlier about the New Age movement being just another expression of selfish hedonism and materialism – not anything resembling a religious movement. In truth, the rise of modern science and the early modern obsession with sorcery were not merely contemporaneous currents within Western society but were … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “More materialistic magic”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1601,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions\/1601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}