Extract IV - Magick

• So you are saying that I am bewitched now?
• Why, is it a bad thing to be? … I mean, where you come from.
• A lot of people believe it is but what's done the greatest damage so far has been the belief in witchcraft, both by people who feared or despised it as well as by those who urged it or believed to practice it.
• So you are saying that wrong takes and destructive abuse of something would make the thing itself wrong and destructive?
• I do not have such opinion of magic since it is non existent to me. I do not believe cards can tell the future, no more can potions change how people feel and react. I do not take “being jinxed” as a legitimate excuse for ditching responsibility. I can not accept the relative position of some gas balls and rocks in space to tell what kind of a person is being born on a planet and even much less can I justify burning people at stake for having supposedly made a pact with an imaginary Satan.
• But you believe reasonable assumptions and complicated calculations can help make a reliable simulation of the most probable future, you can understand how drugs of all sorts could have various effects on the body as well as the mind, you do believe that some people let themselves be manipulated by another due to either ignorance or sick obsession, you can very well accept the fact that the environment has an undeniable influence on how people turn out and you seem alright with the idea of psychological disorders leading to people doing things that a sane mind would never dream of.
  Besides, people in such a state gain abilities we might not dream of, since the disorder manages to take benefit of their mental capacity the way a healthy mind can not afford so easily. You believe in all that, don't you?
• Yes, they are sensible explanation for phenomena, achieved through neutral keen observations and logically conceptualized experiments and studies.
• So think of magic as some alternative source of energy, knowledge etc. which people can wield or witness in motion without being able to explain. You'd be surprised to find out how much of all which sounds reasonably explicable to you is called magic by people.