Personally I feel that everything will eventually be explained by science. If it's "supernatural" then it's just not been explained -yet.
You raise a really good point. Maybe many years from now we'll be able to explain all this supposedly supernatural stuff, kinda like how thousands of years ago phenomena we now understand were thought of as supernatural (lightning, volcanic eruptions, epidemics, etc.)
Exactly! A couple rhousand years ago we thought lightning was God's wrath, rainbows were signs, alcohol was good for children, and lots of other silly things 
In a few thousand years in the future, most of the stuff we do will probably seem pretty stupid, too
I mean, imagine if we discovered that magic is real. Pretty crazy and supernatural, man! But a couple hundred years later, science will have explained how it works and it'll just be another branch of science. Just like medicine went from spirit healing and potions to scientific drugs, alchemy turned into chemistry, and animal/plant husbandry turned into genetics!
Though to be fair the whole "let's drink wine instead of water" thing was possibly because back then people didn't know about germ theory. They just knew drinking water from a stream made them crap out their intestines and drinking wine from a bottle didn't. So they drank wine.
Exactly! They did what seemed to work, and in this instance they were mainly right, but in hindsight, they look stupid for not knowing to boil water, and for getting their kids drunk
My point is not that such practices always fail, but that everything will be proven to work via science, and that many things we do now will look stupid in the future.
For example: chemotherapy seems to work, but it's
brutal on the patient, and I expect will seem barbaric, much as blood-letting and drilling holes in the skull do to us.
Another example, which is nebulous because I too am ignorant, is toxic substances: I would lay money that some if not
many substances we come into regular contact with will be found to be highly poisonous or similarly unhealthy. Prior examples include asbestos construction, lead plumbing, radioactive drinks (seriously), cocaine everything, and mercury.
Superstitious beliefs are similarly easy to fall prey to because they
seem to work! I always pressed the stopwalk buttons at intersections, but recently found out that most are dummy buttons that do nothing; but it SEEMED like it was making it go faster!
Historical examples of superstition that seemed to work include, well, everything anyone ever did, basically: praying/sacrificing for good harvests (and then justifying the outcome afterwards), virgin sacrifices to volcanoes when the rumbles, etc.
The sneaky thing about superstition is that you're inclined to justify the result regardless of what it is. For example, when I was a kid, I really wanted to be a wizard and do magic. To that end, I bought magic books and read how to do magic online. After a failed attempt, I'd just say that "I did it wrong" or "It's more subtle than I thought" or "it has a delay", etc. What I really meant is "there's no evidence this works, but I really
really want it to so it must."
I think I may have gotten off topic... Sorry
Topic: What is your religion? (Read 11307 times)