Why would you want to believe in magic?

- Because even if it is a delusion, it is good for me to have tried it to help somebody and it is good for me to think I have helped in some way. It is good for me to think that even if I am wrong. It encourages me to continue trying to help. Thinking I have done nothing or that God has done the helping not me is detrimental to my psychological health. Faith in magic and the practice of magic would seem to be absolutely necessary for a good person to be a better person.

But what is wrong with wanting to help and loving yourself for wanting it? If magic does not help then believing it does is not the answer. You do not need magic or prayer to stir up the desire to help. Stir it up and the more you help the more you will feel you want to. Using props such as prayer and magic to help yourself feel like helping proves that you are so unhelpful that you have to manipulate yourself to help. It is not the real you that is helping. Why not simply help? Be you!

- The most important spells are the spells we work on ourselves to change our desires and thinking. For example, what use is unimaginable wealth if you don't do spells to help you have the correct attitude to it so that you may get it and enjoy it?

But we can change without magic. Most people can change their attitudes without prayer and magic.

- Because magic or prayer really works.

The evidence that it does is anecdotal and people are carried away by the desire to believe. You need better evidence than that. Big claims need good quality evidence. The only reason you want to believe is because you want to tune into and use a power to stop bad things happening to you and your loved ones. The reality is that even if such power exists you cannot control it or tell it what to do. But you pay lip-service to that and are in denial about it not being a real help.

- Because it makes life work. When you believe that secret forces serve you, your life is blessed by eagerness to face new challenges. You will never feel alone.

- Because you can work magic on your own mind so that you accept the agonies of your life that you cannot change. This acceptance makes your burden easier. You have the confidence of knowing that you have entirely helped yourself.

Magic would mean that you are not entirely helping yourself. Maybe you entirely consent to letting magic help you but that is an admission of weakness and failure. You failed to have the courage to merely accept.

- Because magic is what many people call God though they know it not.

True. God is really a magical entity. To go to God for help is as much involvement in the occult as is going to a witch for a spell.

- Because magic enables you to live an ethical life.

Nonsense.

- Because magic is love and love is magic! Love is the most powerful of all energies. When you love somebody, even for a few minutes, that snowball will roll throughout time and eternity and become an avalanche of blessings! No love is ever wasted! To love a person is to bless them for all time and all eternity. And the love might seem to last only a while, but it merely disappears out of sight and is still there! To love at all is to love for eternity!

We have already answered this point. If magic brings you good results you cannot be grateful to it for it is not a person. Neither is God... Magic is not the great manifestation of love after all.

If love is good, it is good regardless of whether it is temporarily good or eternally good. The argument that love is everlasting in its effects seems to indicate that one is not interested in love if it only does short-term good! If that is really what one things then one does not know love!

- People fear having magical power. Many have been taught that it is manipulative. But it is not being manipulative when we have to use our powers for we are using them anyway. Our thoughts manipulate reality anyway and automatically so we may as well use them with knowledge and with care.

If our magic is manipulative and conniving by default then magic is only going to cause fear if people believe in it. The manipulation is bad whether we can help it or not.

- There could have been nothing. There isn't. How can something come from nothing? It can't but it did. Our existence and all that exists is supernatural. Magic is as real as the water we drink. This gives us consolation and shows that there is always help.

But if magic causes something to come from nothing, then nothing has to have the power to become something. As strange or odd as the notion of all things popping into existence without a creator God doing magic is, that is odder. And what about the disappointed and terrified millions out there for whom magic failed or who think they are cursed by it? What about comforting them?

Because magic is just a fact - it works. The power of thought and the power of magic are one and the same. When you use the power of thought, you are using real forces. For example, if you see an image of your dog in your head, that image is real. It is not a dog but the manipulation of energy into the image of a dog. These forces are part of you and you can create them. The image is supernatural because is it part of you and separate from you at the same time. The very power to do this is magic. It proves magic exists.

You could use the same argument for declaring modelling clay to be magic!

- Understand that magic is an activity that uses powers that are above and beyond the way nature works. Magic is when you exercise these abilities as independent of any deity but yourself. When you try to get a job by the power of desire and thought alone that is magic. Magic and true self-esteem go together.

But is self-esteem being confused with arrogance? You cannot know if your spell got you the job. Would it not be wiser to just believe you have enough confidence to get the job without gimmicks and without magic?