Essay about Witchcraft, Magic and Rationality

This article is about witchcraft and its different varieties of practices in different cultures. This article explains how witchcraft exists and plays an essential part in structural and functional aspects of a society. It also sheds the light on the journey of witchcraft from being profane and wicked to acceptable part of a culture.

There are countless reports throughout history of occurrences where society feared one another, but rarely were there occurrences where society felt feared and confident of one another. There was once a society that feared accusation, but trusted their struggles would disappear with the help of another. Witchcraft was the incredible yet terrifying thing that was responsible for this great uproar in some societies. According to the text Identity, Race and Power, witchcraft is a belief system that serves as a method of social control by directing anger towards others (Miller et al. 2013:214).. Throughout history the individuals with political power would use witchcraft as an excuse to maintain order throughout a given society. Looking at particular societies in Malta and South Africa this paper seeks to provide evidence as to how witchcraft operates to maintain a sense of “order”.

In Kelly James Clark’s Article “Without Evidence or Argument”, Clark argues that belief in God, does not require the support of evidence or argument in order for it to be rational. Clark’s argument is against W.K. Clifford’s article “The Ethics of Belief”, in which Clifford claims that everything must be believed only on the basis of sufficient evidence (139). Throughout Kelly Clark’s article he states many things that support his conclusion of belief without evidence or argument, however, my paper will only discuss what Clark says on p.139 starting with the paragraph “The first problem with Clifford’s…” and the following paragraph, ending with the words “...to see why.”

Magical Realism is one of today's most popular subjects in literature to discuss regarding its history and theory of Magical Realism. It began in the Latin culture and now is known word wide for its attributes. Magical Realism is even rivaling some of the great masterpieces of modern and past literature. Someday Magical Realism will be recognized and respected just as the classics are today.

I don’t know about you, but for me so far, all of our author’s attempts to get an explanation about what witchcraft is has failed. We know that witchcraft is the cause of misfortunes and personal injury sustained by the Azande people through what they believe to be no fault of their own, but I think we have yet to have any understanding of what causes witchcraft itself. Where does it come from, who causes it, and is it in any way like a sort of karma believed to be punishment for bad deeds like in eastern philosophies? I think we need to take a deeper look into witchcraft and what the Azande people are actually talking about, because from what I’ve gathered so far, the Azande believe that witchcraft is an unexplained phenomena of independent events that in no way should have had any reason to take place simultaneously

I see how irrational I am. I do so many countless things that are really just taking up so much of my time and resources. Like getting up and taking the time to change the alarm on your phone to 5 minutes later, even when you know your still going to wake up feeling the exact same. I know we are all guilty of it. I believe that we should use our intuition wisely, and not just act on what we are told. A great quote about irrationality, life, and how we act is “Who can explain life? Who can understand it? Like cats, we just do what we do.” I believe that if we just open our eyes and look at things and how legitimate they really are, we would act irrationally, but

Let’s first look at what being irrational actually means. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, for something to be irrational it must be “not based on reason, good judgment, or clear thinking”. This means that if a vote is “rational”, it must be a clear reflection of what people believe in, not influenced by any outside factors. To see if this is actually the case, we’ll be examining phenomena such as social contagion, emotions and the “voter’s paradox”.

There are some things in life you should believe in not because of evidence, but because of faith. Evidence is a very grey term in my book. There are two main types of evidence, hard and soft. Hard evidence are factual observed things that prove a case 100% or without a doubt. Soft evidence is evidence that is based on probability. For instance, let’s say you are trying to prove a suspect used a rifle to shoot a victim. Your evidence is the suspect’s finger prints on the rifle found at the scene. The evidence here is considered “soft” evidence. The fingerprints prove that the suspect had touched the gun, but not that he actually pulled the trigger. An example of hard evidence is if the suspect declined that he even touched the rifle at the scene. Because his fingerprints were found on it, this proves he in fact did touch the rifle. Not all cases are black and white, and its not always hard evidence that’s discovered. A court can use soft evidence if no hard evidence is determined. Making a decision based on soft evidence is based upon probability. The suspect’s fingerprints were found on the rifle, the suspect was seen in the area at the time of the shooting, and the suspect was seen purchasing ammunition for the rifle earlier in the day is all soft evidence. It does however (with no hard evidence at play) make it more probable that this suspect was in truth the

The concept of magic and magical creatures has been around for a long time, however, in the time period ranging from Beowulf to Malory's Arthur, there has been an evolution in attitudes and the consequent treatment of magic in medieval literature. The discussion of magic involves not only the disparity between Christian and pagan tradition but also of gender roles, most notably in the Arthurian mythos. Beowulf, Marie De France's Bisclavret and Lanval, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Sit Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur involve the concept of magic and magical creatures and consequently, illustrate the treatment of magic of their time.

Whether god exists or not has been in discussion for thousands of years, and an important discussion. Whether it is rational to believe in god or not is another story, like believing in god itself, this topic has brought many discussions. It is one thing to discuss whether god is real or not and it is a complete other to discuss whether it is rational to believe in god or not. I believe that while there may not be any convincing evidence or arguments that God does exist, I do still believe that it is still rational to believe that god does exist. I think this because, believing in God is not simply just believing that he exists, but believing that it can bring good to our lives, we otherwise would not have. It teaches us to have a moral

Kierkegaard denies that God’s existence can be proven because “you can’t attempt to infer the existence of God from his attributes”. This would always lead to doubtfulness. You would be forever waiting for more proof to appear to prove an existence that is impossible to prove, unless something terrible happened that made all of your proof meaningless. Therefore, it is irrational to “believe” in God because God is beyond reason and trying to reason his existence would be illogical. God can only exist in faith because faith does not require

In the 21st century what do people think of when they hear the word magic? Is it Harry Potter and his friends fighting off Lord Voldemort or perhaps as Black Sabbath sings “witches at Black Masses?” It is probably a bit of both depending on your age and religious beliefs. This was not the case during the time period extending from antiquity to the early modern period. People in this time believed that magic could explain things they did not understand or could not explain. It was not for entertainment. “Magic probably claimed to provide all the answers which were later provided by science, technology, and philosophy: it was everything.” This statement stands true for all three periods this paper focuses on even the early modern period when religion was supposed to have taken place of magical beliefs.

Scientific rationality stands as the epitome of human reasoning in the modern era; evidence matters in the assertion of truth. Society looks to the physical world to ascertain what is reasonable, and with the evolution of the scientific method, the past two centuries have also watched the devolution of religiousness. Scientific evidence must be conclusive and unambiguous, derived from true premises, repeatable experiments and observable results. And determine whether the existence of God can be sustained in the presence of scientific rationality.

In Evans-Pritchard’s article entitled “The Notion of Witchcraft explains Unfortunate Events”, he focuses on how witchcraft helps the people of the Azande tribe make sense of the relation between their people and the unfortunate events that they encounter. It does not only provide them with a “natural philosophy” but also dictates a way in which they are expected to react to such unfortunate events. Witchcraft is found in every corner of their culture and influences the way they perceive things and the way

But yet, another question/case arises from clash between the idea of reasoning or relying solely for knowing. Take, for example religion. Natural scientists believe that there is clearly no physical evidence of a God, or that Jesus even existed; therefore a knowledge issue is raised was how is religion deemed as true? They also believe that the Bible is not solid evidence and that even the words in the Bible are altered to what really happened. Yet, is there any way to falsify that there is not a God. It is true that human beings believe in a higher authority. In life, there will always be someone to whom you must answer, for ex. at a job. Imagine a receptionist; he has a boss, who may have a boss, who also may have a boss. This concept transcends into something spiritual in which some people believe that there is someone greater than all human beings, greater than anything on this planet and that thing is God. In the case of religion, because of the fact that it has not been falsified by physical evidence, there is no reason to discard the intuitively appealing explanation.