Reminder that there used to be a $1,000,000 prize available for anyone who could display any sort of supernatural powers that remained unclaimed for 20 years. The challenge rules required that both parties agree upon the test setup, and several people actually tried to claim it and all failed. It astounds me that anyone still believes in this nonsense and that it seems to be becoming even more popular to believe in literal magic and other supernatural idiocy.

This is just a high effort version of "...Then may God strike me dead!" but targeting a spiritual minority instead if the hegemonic national religion. Shouldn't the amount of un-smited politicians indicate that there is no God?

I wouldn't ever do this because as soon as anything went wrong in my life I'd never be able to shake the question that it was super natural. I'm extremely skeptical and don't believe in any supernatural things, but I have a fear of developing superstitions. Also when I get really stressed about my life and feel like it is particularly unfair I start to feel like there is some sort of external source of my problems and it's malevolent. So, doing something like this would be a recipe for problems for me lol.

When I used to be New Age I believed that not believing in magic gave you a resistance to it because Quantum...

Accepting the truth that magic ain't real was tough

i don't believe in witchcraft but I'm not bold enough to challenge people to hex me. not because it might work, but because i might just be unlucky enough that something completely irrelevant would happen to me and that would forever convince them they were right and i was wrong and i would never live that down.

it might even happen while I'm uploading the update to say that everything's fine. something would fall on my head or some shit, I can't take that risk.

I'm loosely pagan on a spiritual level and I vibe a lot with druidism and many of the things that witches do, but as much as I enjoy the culture, I never fail to cringe over the collective hubris of self-proclaimed witches. It's always the edgiest 30-45 year old women who wear House of 1000 Corpses t-shirts and extreme amounts of eye shadow, who post "Proud Bitch" memes on social media and exude an undeserved air of confidence because they believe so deeply their spells are real.

While I admit that Wicca is quite beautiful and largely misunderstood, the things most witches/hexers are practicing only date back a few decades. They're not speaking the ancient magicks or communing with old gods. I can't speak much on the divine feminine because I'm not informed enough on that subject, but for the other half of their belief system they have taken the rather ambiguous depiction of Cernunnos and turned him into a sexy, big-dicked goat man, and have fabricated their own lore to explain the workings of something that is in reality unfathomably old and lost to man, with no surviving origin story and little to no oral tradition.

We can certainly make some educated guesses, but the bulk of that information died with the druids.

This reminds me of some work drama...

My coworker was cursed by our ~~b~~witch of an 'assistant manager' for turning her down, and the next day his mom had hot oil splash up her whole arm and it looked bad.

Not supersticious but he was and he was terrified. It was horrible to watch.

This man is a true servant of The Emperor, the touch of Chaos must be resisted at all costs.

It's just like any other system of belief. You can sit around praying for something, or you can cast more effective hexes, such as "hit this guy with my car," or "actually give him poison."

Lets hope all these internet witches don't learn the power of ~~direct action~~ real magic.

Witches are chill. Wizards are fucking nerds tho.

I have a made up word I have never said to anyone.

Nobody claiming to be psychic has ever been able to detect it.

While it's a meaningless thing overall, it is endlessly entertaining to watch someone spiral from "trying" to discover it, to random guessing, to being angry and declaring that I'm lying and they got it the first time.

It's kinda like my secret. I have a secret I have never told anyone. It's another thing I will put before a self proclaimed psychic. Even once they progress to guessing, none have ever even thrown it out as an option.

And you'd be amazed how many self proclaimed psychics there are out in the world, and how many of them seem to really think they are psychic, to the degree that they'll accept someone presenting one or both of those challenges.

The made up word would be a difficult guess for sure. But my secret isn't something so rare that nobody could possibly hit on it as a guess.

I'm not willing to outright say that there's no thing that could be called psychic ability. What I am willing to say is that nobody has ever exhibited such, and likely never will