this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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Embarrass herself by telling people she believes in witchcraft.
As if its any worse than the alternatives
You say that as if you HAVE to believe in magic.
It's a lot more fun to believe in magic when you know it's not real than to actually believe in magic.
True. But it’s still silly.
So? Ffs have some fun with life before a climate emergency or secret police get to you.
There’s lots of people out there who don’t think playing pretend with magic is enjoyable man. Some people think it’s silly shit. If you like that stuff you’ll just have to accept that part of it.
Look dude, there's people out there who believe in magic and you're just going to have to live with that. Don't get your panties in a twist when you see them online and give into the urge to tell them it's silly.
lol I didn’t get my panties in a twist, you do you, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t think adults practicing witchcraft isn’t silly. And it’s obviously not an unpopular opinion. Y’all are being way too defensive about this.
If you were defending Christians believing Jesus is the Son of God people would probably be flipping their shit.
Yeah I’d never do that. Also this is the internet, people are gonna flip their shit no matter what I say.
All were trying to tell you is don't go out of your way (which you did) to belittle somebody's faith. It's kinda cringe.
Religions are absolutely not above criticism, what a ridiculous thing to say. If your faith requires you to oppress people for things like, say, being born homosexual, then I’m absolutely going to belittle it. And if your faith says that you believe you can cast magic spells, then I’m going to think that’s fucking silly.
Religion=/=faith
The word faith applies in both contexts that I used it for so I don’t understand your point.
No shit?? 😒😑
I cast itchy retina on you.
Underrated reply. My eyes went dry immediately after I read this.
FYI around the time you sent this I rubbed my eye, but forgot that I had cut jalapeños earlier...I do not like you
Fear my arcane spells.
Its not magic, its rune smithing!
You don't have to believe it literally to justify participating, plenty of people who understand rationally that prayer won't instantly get them what they want still pray
Yeah well that shit silly too.
Mindfulness is its own reward and prayer, even to a rock, can help. It’s about surrendering and accepting that there is something in the universe that you have no power over.
It’s not about believing the rock is alive or capable or changing things for you, but by simply reframing your desires as a universal one rather than an internal/personal one you can find yourself motivated in a different way and opportunities may present themselves differently.
I’m also talking about the traditional concept of prayer, not whatever the fuck the Christians are doing.
A lot of Christian’s see how they pray very similarly to what you just described my man.
If you actually practice Christianity, and really the majority of popular religions, in the way they are intended, they all sort of circle back to a lot of these same concepts. It’s when you start attaching material specifics to these intentionally abstract concepts and governing others based on those specifics that things get messy. A true follower of their religion is often not vocal about it.
And? There's more important shit to worry about than people being silly
I’m not worried about it. I just think it’s silly just like people who think the earth is flat are silly. Ultimately I don’t care and I’m not going to tell anybody not to practice witchcraft.
It's definitely worse than not believing in magic
Man im too old to give a fuck what people believe anymore.
The only viable religion is worshiping the sun, since that actually exists.
I have said the exact same thing
Is it though...? As stupid as the Abrahamic God is, at least you have a "God of the Gaps" thing going on where all God really has to be is someone with their own agency to grant you what you ask for and to determine where to place you in an untestable "afterlife". Of course there's an obvious cocktail of inherent contradictions when you choose "omniscient", "omnipotent", and "omnibenevolent" at the same time, but then you can appeal to the idea we wouldn't possibly understand the whims of such a god outside of time and space. Again, stupid as fuck, but you can weasel your way out of anything.
But witchcraft? Okay, you're transferring the agency to yourself, a human that exists here, and you're saying you can perform magic, but now you have no evidence you're capable of jack shit and you have no excuse to pawn it off onto. You'll never be able to do magic your entire life because it categorically isn't real, so is the excuse that witches are real but you personally really suck as one? Is the idea that you do what "God" does and take credit for anything that vaguely "works" by sheer coincidence and ignore everything else? Do you only cast "spells" that function as placebos like easing someone's pain or making them feel happy – similar to many prayers?
And of course with God you don't have any way to test where this magic is coming from; it was there before time and is all-powerful, and there's any number of ways with that setup to weasel your way out. But what's the scientifically measurable phenomenon behind witchcraft? There is none, and unlike God where there also is none, this should be easily testable if it exists since it allegedly interacts with the physical world on your command.
So now you've gone from untestable woo like the afterlife and testable but weaselable woo like prayers to woo that you should absolutely be able to test empirically because you're in control of it.
Prayers and spells are exactly the same behavior, a ritual for asking greater powers to intercede on your behalf. For people who genuinely believe in it there's always some "works in mysterious ways" shit to justify when the thing they asked for never happens so they can keep believing it anyway, and as long as they ask in a vague enough way and on a vague enough timeline something will eventually happen that fits the bill close enough for them to call it a success. For people who don't believe it literally but still participate it's basically just ritualized affirmation, a self pep talk to make them feel more confident or prepared or calm using religious/occult symbolism to psychologically reinforce the effect.
What I think you missed is that I'm saying there are far fewer excuses for spells than there are for prayers. If we think of a prayer or spell like a transmission, one that starts and ends in our reality but can't be measured by science is (even) dumber than one that starts above our reality by an omnipotent, hyperdimensional trickster set on not revealing itself.
A prayer means that someone else – infinitely wiser and outside time and space – will do this for you if they so choose. From this, you have near-infinite freedom to weasel around why your prayer was or wasn't answered. You've made it unfalsifiable, which is intellectual sludge, but it means you've insulated yourself from being provably wrong.
But for "witchcraft"? Yes, this particular brand of delusion often turns to weasel spells (whereas I used to see a lot more of "I can do concrete, measurable things that couldn't happen otherwise"), but given they're making the action happen or creating a conduit for that action, there ought to be some physically observable explanation behind it. But apparently magic can interface with patterns of candles and lavender and minerals and clockwise tea set up by some early 20s stoner in their parents' basement but can't be measured by science.
They're not "exactly the same behavior" because 1) the locus of control is different and 2) that locus of control effectively being yourself should make this scientifically falsifiable.
The mechanism in both cases is that the practitioner does ritual and stuff happens because magic. Who gives a fuck what the magic is???
Except it categorically isn't. If you sit two people in a laboratory – an adherent to an Abrahamic religion and a "practitioner" of "magic" – neither will be able to perform a supernatural feat. We agree that far. But unless the "witch" wants to resort to special pleading that they can't perform it under laboratory conditions for no good reason (the woo magic system presumably isn't sentient and has no reason to care? or maybe they have really bad performance anxiety?), then it's provably false. Even if they say something vague like "better luck" or "better health", well we have statistics for a reason. Are you not powerful enough? Okay, well like, we're measuring down to the attometer at this point. If you want to drink masala chai under an amber calcite chandelier of 100 candles, listening to pagan-coded fantasy music, and you can consistently, measurably move a human hair 20 meters away, congratulations: you've still proven witchcraft is real.
The Abrahamic God, meanwhile, is constructed to be unfalsifiable. It'd be subject to everything I just mentioned except that there are a million bullshit but unfalsifiable rationalizations why a sentient God wouldn't respond to these prayers to let them be observed. Literally no matter how hard you try, a sentient third-party gets the final say.
The difference between believing in a monotheistic God and believing in witchcraft is the difference between believing in Santa Claus and believing you made and placed those presents yourself. Of course neither is true and both are ridiculous: there is another entity putting those presents there, but it's not magic, and by taking action in the real world, you can influence what those presents will be without magic. But for one of them, if you told your other little kid friends, they'd ask you to put up or shut up.
At least witches aren't angling for a theocracy.
Sure but I’m not really interested in playing whataboutism games when we are talking about two different types of make believe.
Then don't try to paint one as somehow more respectable? Or better yet just don't respond to a comment if you don't want to follow a side conversation? What a weird reply
I definitely think witchcraft is more respectable than Christianity, I wasn’t trying to paint it otherwise and I don’t see how you could take what I said as that. But whatever if you’re mad at me just cast a curse on me or whatever and I won’t hold it against you.
Sure. Doesn't make them not stupid as hell; it just makes their beliefs less corrosive to society. I can imagine they'd be extremely toxic if they had widespread public support, but probably still not nearly as much as "I commune with an all-powerful sky daddy whose word is ultimate law that divides people between everlasting bliss and everlasting suffering and I can choose to believe whatever that word is" like Abrahamic religions.
Sure. I think anything that encourages people to believe things that they want to instead of because they're true opens the way for them to apply that blind faith in other things that matter more, like politics. I do think organized religion is a bit worse because it also teaches subservience to undeserved authority.
Anyway, in the end, I'm waaay more worried about the one that is organized and has power than the people that aren't bothering anybody and my opinions will reflect that.
people who do witchcraft are usually kind and interesting