Chapter Seven Page 4
The next day.
Poe: I do believe you can do this. You learned one piece of magic so quickly already.
Miranda: There’s no such thing as magic.
Poe: Then . . . when you transported us across space, what should I call it?
Miranda: A natural process whose properties we don’t fully understand yet. Same as everything else humanity has ever called “magic” or “religion.”
If the weather’s bad, we blame a witch or hire a shaman. When it clears up, we thank Yahweh for sending a rainbow.
We don’t understand how a child gets personality, so we credit a soul. And if the kid was autistic, we used to figure it had been taken by faeries.
Take any real thing — like dinosaur bones —
— and start calling it “magic”, and eventually you lose all perspective. Sooner or later you’re falling for that story from George down the street about that time he fought a real-live one. And, ooh, it breathed fire!
Poe: Now, Master . . . not all of those things are . . .
Miranda has the same perspective on “magic” as the Third Doctor…
*Breaks out the crosses and holy water* Never hurts to be prepared, all I’m saying.
I love that the dragon killer is named George but that’s only to be expected from Erin. Still, the little details fit perfectly.
Also, does anyone know where they are?
Miranda and I seem to disagree on a lot of things.
Yeah, magic is real, ’nuff said.
Gotta love a gal who ditches her friends at the club to teleport across the globe and rhapsodize about science. Also yay dragon!
Whoops, this is supposed to be the next day! (Thus why Miranda’s in a different outfit.) Added a text box to say so.
Oopsie! Really shoulda noticed the outfit change, sorry.
“Magic” is just a name. The lighting won’t became any less destructive if you stop believing it’s Zeus or other deity striking from above. So, you can either be anal about it or just apply science methods on magic. I mean, if you can scientistically prove that if you raise a tall metal totem dedicated to metioned deity next to your house the lighting will strike the totem instead of house, it’s not only as usefull as the lightning conductor but it may be easier to explain to others.
Heh. You reminded me of a scene from a book by Terry Pratchett. A witch has been trying to explain to a woodsman that he has to site his outhouse further away from the well, because germs are getting into the water and making his kids sick. He listen, he nods, he does not re-site the outhouse.
An older witch comes along and tells him goblins are attracted to the smell of poo, and putting a curse on the water. The man immediately re-sites his outhouse. As the older witch explains, it may be true about the germs, but you’d need to change quite a lot of the world – the woodsman’s thick skull among these – to make that man believe in invisible little things that cause disease. But today, goblins will work, and tomorrow his kids will be alive to learn something new.
There was an English horror-series whose name escapes me… This installment reminds me of it.
In this series, a priest was fighting real demonic incursions, but at one point he was himself possessed. Among other things, the demon slashed up his arm from the inside. A therapist was appointed to him and tried to convince him he was delusional. She was convinced that he’d been cutting himself. (She was rather caricatured, I’m afraid; she was portrayed as completely to anything spiritual, considering it all to be delusional.)
In the end, the priest was exorcized by an old enemy briefly turned ally, and his demon-inflicted wounds healed. The therapist came to see him a bit after this, insisting that ‘he needed help’, because cutting disorders don’t just go away. The priest showed her his unblemished arm, and she insisted that he’d been faking the wounds before.
Priest: “So no matter what evidence I could show you, you couldn’t believe in it?”
Therapist: “Absolutely not. Never.”
Priest *smiling*: “Maybe you should see someone about that.”
As much as it pained me that the exchange was so stereotypical when the series was otherwise quite well-done, I thought the priest’s final comment was hilarious. And you can now probably see why this strip reminded me of it. ^^
Your ancestors called it magic. You call it science. Where I come from, those things are one and the same…
I wish society could accept that this was true already.
We are, or at least would be, baffled if a genie materialized out of a lamp and granted us wishes. (That or we’d assume that we were drunk)
I bet that those who consider that kind of happenings rare yet regular would speechless at a lifeless duck making squeaking noises and blowing air. (That’s you, Arthur Weasly!)
I’m not saying that magic is real or not real. I’m just saying, “Miranda, different people have different views, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. For instance, you own a magical slave. Yet you claim that all of his kind doesn’t exist. In a parallel universe such as mine, they don’t truly NOT exist, but most are ignorant of such beings, and would laugh if you told them they existed, especially since you KNOW that they exist. Take that statement of magic’s nonexistence to a place or time that believes in nothing else, they would scorn you for your ignorance. Laugh as you may, it really might just be there, it’s just that we don’t that the faith to recognize it.”
WALL OF TEXT!!! XX
Miranda’s not saying Poe and his kind don’t exist; she’s only saying that “magic” is the wrong word to use for them. Just as someone might say “lightning isn’t magic” without meaning “there is no such thing as lightning.”
Her insistently rational way of looking at things isn’t that different from Sparrow’s Cylon theory, really…
To Sparrow, Beings are robots, to the rest of the world, they’re, well…Beings.
Hey, I LIKE George’s story about the dragon!
And really, he fought it twice, and it kicked the heck out of him both times before he finally got anywhere!
I really enjoy the philosophical tidbits that come with the comic.