Religion and Magic

It seems pretty obvious that people who profess to be religious fall into several categories. For some, the way of life prescribed by their religion is important in its own right. Their religious beliefs are also an ethical and personal stance. The supernatural part of their belief system is not central to them; they rarely spend much time or energy attempting to make sense out of a supernatural world-view which exists independently of the physical laws of time and space.

For others, religion is simply a socially-acceptable way of believing in magic and the supernatural. This group of people believes that they are individually or as a group "special" and have some kind of entitlement to transcend the laws of reality. They believe they get "special dispensation" and that they can work magic on the universe, causing it to behave as they want it to. No matter how rarely that works, it works by sheer chance often enough that their belief is reinforced. When their prayers or magical chants are not answered as they want, they believe that they have done something wrong or that God (or whoever they believe is "in charge") is refusing their request.

In any case, the magical believers have a special relationship to the universe. They pray for rain, for health, for blessings, for success, for their personal (and frequently petty) little wants and desires. They pray that they will get a job, that someone will get fired, that they will win the lottery, that they won't get caught at whatever they're doing. It's magic, just simply magic. It has NOTHING to do with religious belief. They don't understand that prayer is not about changing the universe to fit their personal needs, that instead prayer is a behavior intended to put them in a proper frame of mind to deal with what comes next in their lives.

It seems to me that the vast majority of people professing religious belief belong to the latter group. They are essentially still primitive in their moral and ethical beliefs, still naive about how the laws of nature work, feeling special and "entitled". Most of them don't even pretend to live according to the rules of their religion, because for them religion is about getting what they want, not about living "right." They are the same people who buy lottery tickets, who gamble at Las Vegas, who believe in their hearts that since they are "special" they will get a better deal than the rest of us. It's amazing that in spite of all the evidence they never seem to get discouraged.