From Echidne, a jaw-dropping tale from the fundie vs. reason battleground in our public schools.
Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.
But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.
“I get a call the middle of the day from the supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue. You can’t take any more assignments. You need to come in right away,’” he said.
When Piculas went in, he learned his little magic trick cast a spell that went much farther than he’d hoped.
“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.
Read that next to this post by tristero, to really get that he’s not kidding when he says this.
That people like Robertson, Hagee, and Dobson feel, at present, restrained from calling for the killing of heretics, abortion providers, blasphemers and other “undesirables” is not due to their inherent tolerant impulses: they have none. If America’s Taliban is not advocating the execution of infidels or oppressing women at the same horrific level as the Taliban itself, it is due to the strenuous effort of those other Americans who have been fighting tooth and nail to maintain church/state separation and strenuously object to any erosion of it, no matter how seemingly trivial.
Now we have someone being accused of witchcraft, though his life is not on the line, just what amounts to a part-time job. But again, it’s really a matter of the restraints put in place on our crazy theocrats, which are numerous and, as tristero says, intolerant and apparently paranoid in the extreme. Magic tricks are not rocket science, and they certainly aren’t magic, and I doubt very seriously this guy was trying to pull a John Edward and pass off his parlor trick as real magic.
Interesting, I read a book years ago by James Randi, and he detailed how he’d encountered some people who pass off magic tricks as real (and took his Million $ Challenge, failing of course) and claimed to have received their magic powers from god, and thus were embraced by the very hardcore Christians who nowadays seem threatened by wizardry and witchcraft. It makes me wonder if there’s been a sea change in the opinion on magic tricks (passed off as real or not), or if you get a big pass if your hocus-pocus nonsense can be used as a church recruitment tool.
46 Responses to “Yep, wizardry”
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Well, supposedly people with high “right-wing authoritarian” scores show more gullibility about anything their authorities haven’t warned against.
“If America’s Taliban is not advocating the execution of infidels or oppressing women at the same horrific level as the Taliban itself, it is due to the strenuous effort of those other Americans who have been fighting tooth and nail to maintain church/state separation…”
I think one of the important epiphanies I had back in the day (in my late teens / early tweens) was that, given the opportunity, we live among (some) people who would happily stone adulterers, cut off hands for steeling, burn “witches” at the stake, hold inquisitions, and all the rest. And most of it would be done in the name of some “god” that “demanded” those things be done to punish the “wicked”.
It made me realize that “civilization” is a very thin veneer over a whole lot of horrible human impulses and tendencies. We may think we’re (much) more than animals, but that’s not necessarily a proven fact…
“Veneer”…. perhaps ‘thin FILM’ is more like it.
have you read about Sister Novena’s bout with a mom in the market to make her child a “real wizard”? Pretty damn funny and sorta scary all at the same time. Talk about a Demon Haunted World.
My wife and I are trying to adopt.
We chose the cool agency that has cool people.
The homestudy was today - when I said that we were pagan, her eyes glazed over, and she stopped listening.
We don’t know what the result will be, but my wife is saying that she wished I hadn’t mentioned it - just that we were Unitarian.
How much of an idiocrat do you have to be to believe that stage magicians perform real magic? Do they believe that the lady is really sawn in half (if stage magicians still do that trick)? Are the Christian Right going after Penn & Teller?
We are well into the new Dark Ages.
I asked my brother if his nazarene fiance would mind if I gave her son a magic trick kit.
He said she didn’t mind because magic tricks are ILLUSIONS and not “magic” reserved for Christ.
Sounds like some idiots are unable to make such basic distinctions between supernatural wizardry and clever eye-fooling tricks.
Oh, no, they didn’t. They did not accuse a man of “wizardry” for performing a magic trick for children.
Where is the bottom? Where is the honest-to-God bottom depth of stupidity for these people, below which even they cannot sink?
This came up over at Pharyngula, and the perpetually sagacious Sastra, O.M., made this comment:
So, yes, there are plenty of people with a poor grasp of reality.
Bitter-I haven’t seen yet. Honest to pete, my sister once told me she had severe misgivings about letting her children dye easter eggs. She heard from a lady at church who heard it from a friend of a friend, etc… that easter eggs were pagan! and that the red ones used to be dyed in the blood of babies sacrificed to some pagan deity. She was genuinely concerned for their souls. Because of a Paas Easter Egg Dyeing Kit.
“Where is the bottom?”
Rejection of medicine in favor of keeping people’s humors in balance, rejection of sun-centric orbits, stoning heretics who insist human flight is a possibility, return of alchemy and astrology as “legitimate” science…
In short, rolling back the last 600-years or so of human history.
They’ll be sure to keep The Bomb though. You never know when you’ll need to turn your neighbors to ash and their land into a glass parking lot…
“Because of a Paas Easter Egg Dyeing Kit.”
Oh it SEEMS innocent…until you come home one day and find your kids are WORSHIPING SATAN!!!…
When I was in college, I joined a children’s theater production of “William’s Window.” It’s basically kid-friendly Shakespeare.
I only had one line, but I was dating the production manager at the time. He said they regularly received calls from schools asking if there was any type of witchcraft/magic involved. One of the mini-Shakespeare’s was “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” so that meant magic and meant those schools wouldn’t be bringing their children.
As much as I love West Virginia, there are times I have to shake my head in wonder at how fucked up we are.
They’re afraid of the possibility that Jesus was tricking them the whole time:
“During a ribald supper, indeed, the cheat [Christ] transforms, so they say, water into wine; in a desert he feeds a few bandits upon the victuals previously hidden there by his devoted confederates; one of his cronies plays dead, our impostor restores him to life again; he betakes himself to a mountain and there, before two or three of his friends only, he brings off a jugglery that would cause the worst among our contemporary mountebanks to redden with shame.”
The Marquis de Sade, “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” 1795
It’s so appropriate that your “submit” button, Amanda, says “Blaspheme!”
Exactly Sean.
So what’s up with all that make-believe canabalism shit?
The Marquis has an answer for you, Ms Kate:
“Weird rites [in the Church] are instituted under the name of ’sacraments;’ the most offensive and the most abominable of them all is the one whereby a priest, covered with crimes, has, notwithstanding, thanks to a few magical words, the power to bring God back in a morsel of bread. Let there be no mistake: at its very birth, this shameful cult might have been utterly destroyed had one but employed against it those weapons of the contempt it deserved; but men took it into their heads to employ persecution; the cult throve; ’twas inevitable.”
Sean, the admonition to blashpeme is the antithesis of submission.
Here, chez Pandagon, we do not submit our comments.
Overeaction….much? While the right to be a complete and utter religious nutjob is one that surely must be protected, when it begins costing people jobs its time for some intelligence to reign…..
He obviously graduated Hogwarts Magna Cum Laude
….
Seriously, no Harry Potter jokes yet? You disappoint me.
So what’s up with all that make-believe canabalism shit?
He was trying to do something actually cool and dramatic, but LARP rules are specific. Just use your imagination and stop being a jerk about it.
It’s all fun and games until someone misses the Rapture.
When my wife was a little girl, her mother made her throw out her poster of a unicorn and her Edgar Allen Poe books because they were gateways that demons could use to get into the house. Mom-in-law is a little better now but I’ve heard stories from her family about encounters with witches, harpies and ghosts.
Oh sure it’s easy to laugh about this now, but what if he HAD been a wizard who derived his powers from demons and all the powers of darkness, huh? Then what smartypants? In a post 9/11 world we cannot let the smoking gun be a school of innocent children transformed into newts and toads…
Two relevant anecdotes:
A neighbor had a magician performing at her daughter’s birthday party. One 5-6 year old boy said he couldn’t watch the show because “his teacher said that magic wasn’t real”. This kid was in kindergarten or first grade, and his public school teacher tells the class “magic isn’t real”–without making the distinction between “magic” and “prestidigitation”. I was floored. (Add in the fact that somehow the kid took away the message “therefore you shouldn’t watch any magic shows, ever in your life”, and it really makes me wonder what was actually said in the classroom. I hold out hope that the kid seriously misunderstood the teacher.)
The oldest documented magic trick is the disappearing handkerchief. In the 14th centurey (IIRC–don’t have the source handy), a street performer was accused of witchcraft and dragged into court. He saved his life by demonstrating, in court and on record, how the trick was done. I think that is a very important precedent to talk about along with this story. What this school district is doing is a Dark Ages Witch Trial–literally.
Speaking of magic tricks, I had a friend who did walkaround card magic at corporate events for extra money in college. He was good, and showed me my all-time favorite card trick, All Backs:
Well, I guess I can’t do an embed. Link.
The really funny thing is that Randi also has a number of stories about being buttonholed by people who refused to believe that his “magic” wasn’t actually real, no matter how much he protested to the contrary.
Now, how would you feel if the rest of the class left you behind in second grade? They all have these important jobs and careers and went to college and you had to leave at 21 and the ninth grade. They think they all so smart but Preacher BillyBob tells me theys demons out there and he needs to drive them outta my 12 year old daughter. He does it at least three times a week. Tires him out and the demons squeal so when they leaves.
Some French academics have postulated that the majority of humans can’t comprehend much beyond the village. That the elites have to protect the rubes from themselves. I see the point but that means that GWBush and Cheney are really not what I consider elite.
So making a toothpick disappear is the work of an evil wizard (like Harry Potter) is it.
The documentary Jesus Camp was shown on UK television last night. Most of the comment today has included words and phrases like chind abuse, disgusting spectacle, lunacy and “these effing nutters should be locked up.”
I managed to conjure (oops, pardon, I’m the spawn of Satan) a comical article out of it, if you can call jokes about kids being waterboarded because they put on a fleece sweatshirt with cotton underpants comical.
It’s hardly surprising. Sounds like area schools probably have a vested interest in distracting folks from this:
from the linked article:
(Even New Port Richey? Not New Port Richey!)
There was even a substitute teacher in New Port Richey who got in trouble after investigators say she had a relationship with an underage student.
Hey kid wanna watch me make my toothpick disappear?
Dunc, something similar took place with Arthur Conan Doyle and the man history knows
as Harry Houdini:
They should hire wizard Ricky Jay as a replacement. He can even give historical references to earlier wizards.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=Hgm4wZCACYg&feature=related
Yeah, it’s possible that religious fundamentalism atrophies the brain to the point where you start thinking a man can actually make a toothpick disappear, but one might be generous and say they believe the trick, while a simple illusion, might tempt angry demons into showing us some of their magic, which are not silly parlor tricks.
I mean, give them a little credit, right?
junk, just imagine if he’d showed them a Ouija board.
I see many angry villagers carrying pitchforks and torches…
on the Houdini thing, I seem to recall the story being that a major cause of the dispute between Houdini and Doyle was Houdini taking Doyle on one of his debunkings, the mystic claiming to speak to houdini’s mother, who was an immigrant who never learned English.
Doyle responded that “perhaps she learned english in the afterlife.”
Houdini was not amused, be it a joke or an attempt to grant waaay too much benefit of the doubt to the medium.
Easter eggs *are* pagan! Just another holiday symbol stolen by the church to convert the heathens in Europe in the Middle ages.
We may think we’re (much) more than animals, but that’s not necessarily a proven fact…
Actually, this kind of sick behavior is uniquely human. Animals don’t do this kind of sh!t to one another.
I have a friend right now who says that when she was younger, her mom (*very* fundamentalist Christian, from my understanding) wouldn’t let them celebrate Easter (even, as far as I can tell, the RELIGIOUS part) because it was “pagan”.
(sorry if this double posts, I think the anti-spam ate the first try)
Actually, this kind of sick behavior is uniquely human. Animals don’t do this kind of sh!t to one another.
Ducks commit mass rape. Cats eat their young. Chimpanzees stalk, torture and kill other chimpanzees.
When I was in high school (in Virginia), I was obsessed with a fantasy novel about kids who could do magic, and one day decided to mess with my little sister and her friend by pretending that I could actually do magic. My sister’s friend’s mother (a well-educated, intelligent woman) then called my mother and I was forced to apologize for doing something that made her thing I was a “satanist.”
Perhaps even more disturbingly, my boyfriend’s mother (a well-educated, intelligent woman) once got an automatic email reply from a mailer-daemon and was convinced that there was an actual demon in her computer sending her email.
Sometimes I think us liberals are living in a freaking cave.
Even if Piculas is a wizard, the toothpick trick described is probably, like, a cantrip at most. Maybe prestidigitation or something. Surely it’s not all that worth getting worked up about. It’s not as if he baleful polymorph‘ed a disruptive student or anything.
anastasi: Easter eggs *are* pagan! Just another holiday symbol stolen by the church
With the no-eggs-during-lent rules, Easter eggs came natually. You had little choice but to eat huge amounts of eggs for Easter, because the chickens keep laying during lent…
You missed out a vital piece of the report in order to spice this thing up:
I would have fired him if he wasn’t actually teaching but instead just winging it ALL. THE. TIME. Whilst it’s acceptable to do fun things once in a while, it sounds like him letting the kids do their own thing in order to avoid teaching is the greater issue. The magic trick was just the ‘last stick’.
Keith, unicorns aren’t demonic-they’re actually mentioned in the Bible as if they were real creatures, and the Bible compares God’s powers favorably to them (”He hath, as it were, the strength of a unicorn”)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,354400,00.html