What Patriotism Means to a Liberal

The other day I was taken aback when I heard a nice, intelligent-sounding young woman explain why she disapproved of Barack Obama and supported Donald Trump: she said she thought Trump has more pride in America. I think it really jolted me because I had just listened to Obama's farewell address, and it was absolutely packed with patriotic themes: with references to American history, to freedom, to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, and much more. It seemed like the essence of patriotism to me.

Of course, it was a very different kind of patriotic expression than Trump's, and maybe that's why it didn't seem like patriotism to her at all. And Trump's approach, with its appeals to fear and jingoism, had never seemed like patriotism to me. Frankly, Trump's idea of American pride scares me. We all know that pride has a dark side. In people and in nations, pride can be healthy self-respect, but it can also be a destructive arrogance. Trump's American pride strikes me as the second kind--the kind of belligerent, uncritical nationalism that has caused untold suffering in recent centuries.

Patriotism can simply be another word for nationalism, and I think anybody will agree that nationalism also has a dark side. The most extreme example, of course, is Nazi Germany; a case of runaway nationalism that caused one of the greatest tragedies in human history. After living through it, Albert Einstein called nationalism "the measles of mankind". I can see his point.

But I want to be clear. I'm not saying Trumpism is equivalent to Nazism. I'm just saying it leans in that ultra-nationalist direction much more than I am comfortable with. At the same time, I think patriotism can be a good thing. Patriotism can simply mean loving one's country, and I do love my country. Many conservatives have the idea that liberals don't love America. I've even heard some say that liberals like Obama hate America. We don't. We love our country, but we have a different idea of what that means, and how to express it. Our love of country--our patriotism--doesn't look the same as the conservative version, and I think that's why conservatives sometimes have difficulty recognizing it.

So, I'd like to clarify what patriotism means for liberals (or at least this liberal), and why I can't agree with Trump's version of it. My purpose here isn't to denounce anybody, but to explain why I, and millions of other liberals, love our country, and what that means.

Before I can explain what my patriotism is, though, I have to explain what it isn't. Please bear with me through the negatives--I'll get to the positives.

My patriotism isn't about declaring that my country can do no wrong. Clearly, it has done wrong. Look at slavery. Look at Jim Crow. Look at how we treated Native Americans. It serves no purpose to pretend those things never happened. Nothing good can come of declaring, "My country, right or wrong". To do so lets us excuse whatever we do, right or wrong, simply because it is us doing it.

My patriotism isn't about an aggressive belligerence toward other countries. It isn't the "my way or the highway" attitude George W. Bush showed the world, and Trump is now showing. Many other countries, and their citizens, have achieved great things, and deserve our respect. America shouldn't act like a swaggering high school bully any more than the bully should. If that approach is wrong for an individual, why should it be right for an entire nation? Besides, as I mentioned above, history has shown that we aren't always in the right.

My patriotism isn't about thinking our leaders and their policies can't be criticized. This was also a view of patriotism that developed during the Bush years, and many times before. Remember the Dixie Chicks? I suspect it's going to make a comeback under Trump. But what kind of sense does such an idea of patriotism make in a democratic republic? Ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and as the Declaration of Independence says, it "derives its just powers from the consent of the governed". That means the governed should always be able to speak their conscience, whether in dissent or agreement with official policies or with the opinion of the majority.

My patriotism isn't necessarily militaristic. Of course I honor the sacrifices and bravery of the people who have fought and died on behalf of this country. Their sacrifice is greater than any I'm ever likely to make. At the same time, not every military action our country has engaged in, or might engage in, is justified. Some of our wars should not have been fought, and that can't be changed by the terrible fact that Americans died fighting them. That is tragic, but it's true. Politicians learned long ago to suppress dissent by starting wars and then claiming that questioning those wars is equivalent to disrespecting our troops. It isn't equivalent, and we should never let politicians use our soldiers' sacrifice as a tactic of manipulation. And we should never let them send our soldiers off to risk their lives in an unjust war.

My patriotism isn't about a quasi-religious reverence for symbols like the flag. It seems to me that what's really important isn't the symbol, but the principles it represents--the principles expressed in the Declaration and Constitution. Similarly, my patriotism isn't about forced expressions of allegiance to those symbols, as in the Pledge of Allegiance. I've never thought it made sense to affirm our freedoms by requiring people to stand up and recite a pledge in unison. Where is the freedom in that? Besides, the Pledge isn't a founding document like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. It was created by a Christian socialist Baptist minister (imagine that!) in 1892, as a part of a campaign to sell American flags. The "under God" part wasn't added until 1954--around the same time that "In God We Trust" was added to our money. And that brings us to religion...

My patriotism isn't about linking American pride or identity to Christianity, or any particular religion. Many of our founders were freethinkers, not orthodox Christians, and they were careful to separate religion and government, on the theory that good fences make good neighbors. James Madison modeled the First Amendment on the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, written by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson later said that mention of Jesus was expressly left out of that statute, because it was "meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination." Freedom of religion is one of most precious things we have in this country, but today the phrase has been twisted to mean the freedom to discriminate. That's the very opposite of what freedom of religion is about. It's about the freedom to believe, or not, according to your conscience, not to impose your belief on others. As a freethinker myself, I'm following a tradition that goes back to Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen, and Thomas Paine. Should those original patriots be considered unpatriotic because they weren't orthodox Christians?

Similarly, my patriotism isn't about imagining that "real" Americans come in any particular race or religion. A white Baptist cowboy born in Texas is not one speck "more American" than a gay Filipino Muslim in born in California...or a Hindu born in India and naturalized as an American citizen. To think otherwise is to misunderstand what this country is about. It's about freedom, diversity, and opportunity; not any particular race or religion. If you want to see a truly deep kind of patriotism, go to a business owned by a naturalized immigrant with an accent. Very often you'll find a picture of them proudly standing in front of the flag on the day they became an American citizen.

That's why my patriotism also isn't about suspicion of foreigners, or the idea that my life is more important than anyone else's because I was lucky enough to be born in this country. I recently heard a Trump supporter say he thinks one American life is worth millions of foreign lives. Millions! I once heard someone say, "I'm a nationalist. I don't care what happens to foreigners". I'm appalled by that attitude. It seems both cruel and nonsensical to me, and here's why: imagine that a Muslim child is adopted from Syria and raised as an American Christian. Does that event magically change something and make her life more important than if she had stayed in Syria? More important than if she had stayed Muslim? If so where does that happen? At the border? When she is baptized? Does it make her hopes and fears, her pains and aspirations, less real? Of course it doesn't. My birthplace might make me luckier than others, but it doesn't make me better than others, or my life more valuable.

OK. Enough about what my idea of patriotism isn't. Now let me say what it is.

My idea of patriotism and pride in my country was best stated by a German immigrant named Carl Shurz, who became an American citizen, a Union general, a United States senator, and Secretary of the Interior. In 1899, he spoke in opposition to people using patriotism as an excuse to annex land after the Spanish-American war.

I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: ‘Our country—when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right.'

That's my idea of patriotism: not to declare that our country is always right just because it's our country, but to strive to make sure it actually is right. What patriotism means to me is a continuing struggle to achieve the promises our country was founded on: that we are all created equal, that governments are created by the people and derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; to freedom of speech, freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of the press, assembly, petition, and all the other principles in the Bill of Rights. Those are principles that generations of Americans have have fought--and still fight--to turn into realities.

It's a continuing struggle. I think that's important to remember. The principles in the Declaration and Constitution were set down over 240 years ago by people we rightfully call founders, but that was only the beginning. When the Declaration was written, its authors had no intention of treating all men--or all people--as if they were created equal. Only property-owning white men had all the rights of citizens, and millions were enslaved--the Constitution referred to them as "three fifths of all other persons". The Bill of Rights was widely ignored, and didn't even apply to the states at first. What had to happen next, to begin achieving the promise of our founding documents, was best expressed by Martin Luther King: people had to "cash the check" those documents had written.

People had to fight to hold their country to its promise that we are all created equal, and have inalienable rights. It's often said that we owe our freedom and rights to our veterans who fought for them, and that's absolutely true, but we owe them to others as well. We owe them to the people who fought with words and activism instead of guns; who fought in the courts, in Congress, in the newspapers, and on the streets to abolish slavery, to secure the vote for women, to gain citizenship for Native Americans, to overturn Jim Crow, to fight discrimination based on sexuality and gender identity, and on and on and on. Many of those people died before they ever saw the fruits of what they fought for. Think about that: Dred Scott died before slavery was abolished. Elizabeth Cady Stanton never saw women voting. Homer Plessy didn't live to see Rosa Parks win the fight he lost. I once came across Plessy's tomb in New Orleans, and stood there awestruck by that brave man fighting for rights he would never see realized. That's why I consider these people, and many others like them, to be founders of our country just as much as Jefferson or Madison, because they helped fulfill the promises those original founders made, but didn't keep.

So that's my idea of patriotism. I love my country, and because of that, I want it to fulfill its promise. And I don't think it's unpatriotic to say it still has work to do. I want my country to keep the principles it was founded on, and the rights and freedoms its citizens have won since then. My patriotism is about fighting to make sure we achieve a country with real freedom of religion, real freedom of expression, real due process of law, real government by the people, and real equality for all Americans. That's what patriotism means to me.

But it means something else, too. As I wrote the words above just now, I realized I haven't really earned the right to attempt soaring rhetoric. How much have I sacrificed to make the principles of the Declaration and Constitution a reality? What have I done, compared to people like George Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, or scores of others? Not much. Not yet. Yes, my patriotism is about pride, because I'm proud of what my country has achieved,but it's also about modesty: modesty on the national level in recognizing that our country has not fully realized its promise, and modesty on a personal level, in recognizing that my contribution so far has been slight. My patriotism, then, is about recognizing that what's truly great about America are the rights and freedoms people before me have fought for in struggles I can hardly imagine.

Finally, my patriotism is about understanding that those rights and freedoms have to be protected. It's about realizing there will always be people like Donald Trump, who will try to chip away at them, and perversely claim to do so in the name of patriotism. And if I ever want to think of myself as a patriot--as someone who works to make his country right and keep his country right--I have to do my part to keep that from happening.

How to Make the Earth Seem Flat

If you know me, what I'm about to say might come as a bit of a shock, so I'm just going to throw it out there: I kinda think the earth might be flat. Not only that, I think the sun and moon might be much smaller and closer to us than we've been told--maybe just a few miles above the earth. I know it sounds crazy, but I just can't ignore what I've seen with my own eyes. Before you decide I've lost my mind, just consider a couple of pictures I want to show you--pictures I took myself. Stay with me for just a minute, and try to forget all you've heard from the "experts" about the shape of the earth, and the distance to the sun and moon, and look at the evidence for yourself.

Here's the first picture:

I took it from just east of Denver, looking toward the Front Range of the Rockies. I'm sure you've
seen sunbeams--technically called crepuscular rays--before. But have you ever wondered why they diverge outward like this? They shouldn't do that. If the sun is really 93 million miles away, and much bigger than the earth, then sunbeams should be almost perfectly parallel. Any divergence as the rays cross the relatively tiny distance across earth would be miniscule. But these clearly aren't parallel. If you really look, and forget what you've been told, you can see that they seem to be coming from a small source not that far above the mountains. The foothills in the foreground in this image are about 3,000 feet higher than the plains. If you use them as a ruler and count upward, you can see that the source of the sunbeams is about 6 times as high as the mountains--say, 18,000 feet up. That's nothing! There are clouds higher than that! And that brings me to my next picture:

It's a picture of the moon, and it's definitely not going to win any photography prizes. I'm sharing it
because I took it myself, so I know it hasn't been doctored in any way except that I cropped it to give a closer look at the moon. And "close" is the operative word here! If you look at that image, you can clearly see that the cloud in the picture is behind the moon! How could that be if the moon is over 200,000 miles away? If clouds are behind the moon, it can't be more than a few miles up. Maybe that sounds crazy, but should I just disregard the evidence of my own eyes...evidence I can capture in a camera and share with you, so you can see it for yourself?

The answer is yes, yes I should, and so should you. It's time to come clean: I don't really believe the earth is flat, or that the sun and moon are just a few miles above us. I did take both of those pictures, but what they to show are illusions. The first one, with the sunbeams, is one of the most compelling optical illusions I know. As I said, if the sun is really huge and millions of miles from earth, then its rays should be almost perfectly parallel; as parallel as a set of train tracks. And they are. The picture below shows crepuscular rays from space as the sun sets. They are clearly parallel. But if you were standing on the earth's surface, they would appear to diverge, for the same reason train tracks appear to diverge: perspective. The apparent divergence is a mind-boggling illusion, but an illusion nonetheless. This video explains it in more detail (and in a pleasing Scottish accent.)

As for the image of the clouds behind the moon, that's a little easier to explain. The disc of the moon at night is simply quite bright compared to the surrounding scenery, and many clouds are partly translucent. When clouds appear to be behind the moon, what's happening is that the moon is shining through the clouds. In a photograph like the one I shared, the moon's bright disc is so overexposed that you can see no trace of the clouds in front of it (you can't see the moons craters and valleys, either.) This article and video explains how the effect happens (it actually discusses the sun, which can also seem to be in front of clouds, for the same reason).

So, why am I messing with you like this, pretending to think the earth is flat, and the sun and moon are just a few miles above out heads? I'm not just being a troll, I hope. The point I want to make is that it's really easy to cast doubt on sound, established scientific facts. The earth is round, vaccines save lives, the earth is getting warmer, and life evolved through a process of evolution by natural selection. These are all well-established tenets of modern science, but if you want to find apparently compelling arguments against them online, you can. (In fact, the arguments against them are easier to find than the arguments for them). And if you're like me, reading these anti-science arguments will give you a deeply uneasy feeling. You'll think, "This sounds kinda reasonable. What if I'm the one that's deluded here?" Perhaps you had a similar feeling reading the first part of this post, for which a more honest title would be "Why I Think the Earth is Flat...for Just a Second...When I Talk to Flat-Earthers." If you're like me, you go around assuming that most people are basically honest and have a firm grip on reality. So if someone shows you apparently-compelling evidence that the earth is flat, you may start questioning your own grip on reality. I do, anyway. It's the same reason gaslighting is an effective--and truly evil--way of making someone question their own sanity. A flat-earther who makes you seriously consider his arguments may not mean to be gaslighting you, because he believes them himself, but that's effectively what he's doing.

As I mentioned, this gaslighting effect happens because we tend to think most people are basically honest and in touch with reality. Sadly, this isn't true. Some people are unabashed liars, but what's far more common is that otherwise-sane people are simply delusional about some things. This is natural. We are small creatures in a very large, complex universe, and our brains are easily fooled (for evidence of this, take a look at these optical illusions). We are so easily fooled that for most of human existence, common sense said that the planet we spent every day of our lives on was flat. And common sense was wrong. That's how limited our perception is. That's how prone to illusion we are. Science is a way of expanding our perception and systematically finding and dispelling our illusions. But many don't see it that way. They trust their own perceptions far more, and see science as a vast and sinister plot, cooked up by an global elite to make money and lead good people astray.

For example, I just had a conversation on Facebook with one of these people--a man who truly does believe the earth is flat. And he wasn't totally insane. He could express himself rather clearly, and he seems to be a fairly functional member of society. Yet he believes in a vision of the cosmos that's been debunked since Aristotle. Not only that, but he also believes that everything we've been told about a round earth is part of a massive, sinister conspiracy: The moon landing was faked. Satellite images of a round earth on the evening weather are faked. Antarctica is a giant, icy wall encircling the flat disc of the earth, guarded by NASA to keep people from learning the truth. He is sane in many ways, but on this topic he is utterly delusional.

The problem is that for a while, he can sound somewhat convincing, by repeating some of the same claims I repeated above. Because our brains are so prone to illusion, it's easy to find very bad arguments that can seem very convincing, and can be very hard to refute. And it's not just flat-earthers. Many other delusional people can sound just as convincing, and the Internet is full of their arguments--sometimes presented on very professional-looking websites. And that's what really worries me. In an age when we've defeated smallpox, landed remote control cars on Mars, and cracked the genetic code, more and more people are rejecting basic tenets of science, because they're reading anti-science websites on the internet. The ranks of flat-earthers, moon landing conspiracists, and antivaxxers are growing. It's enough to make me worry that the wonder of modern technology known as the Internet could usher us into a new Dark Age of ignorance and superstition, where people reject the hard-won discoveries of science in favor of something they saw by some guy with a YouTube channel. It may sound far-fetched, but it's happening all around us. And we have to find a way to stop it. Whatever problems the world has now, we're a lot better off than we were in the Dark Ages.

True Magic; Real Miracles

One of [the brain's] functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying “Wow,” a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening.  - Terry Pratchett

It doesn't stop being magic just because you know how it works. - Terry Pratchett, again 

The Raising of Lazarus

As a skeptic, I'm sometimes accused of being blind to the possibility of magic and miracles. But the fact is, I see miracles every single day. Just this morning, for example, I woke up on a great spinning sphere in space, just as it turned to slowly reveal another, gigantic sphere; one too brilliant to even look at directly. The big sphere was turning mass into energy, just as Einstein described, and I could feel the results warming my skin from 93 million miles away. All along the streets were living organisms taller than houses, also bathed in the morning light. They had used the light over the years to build themselves out of little more than air and water. Some had covered themselves in flowers. The best jeweler in history couldn't have made a single one of those flowers, and the trees were making them by the thousands, without even thinking about it. In one of the trees was a small, feathered dinosaur. It made a laughing sound that told me it was a woodpecker, and then it flew away. It was a fantastical, wondrous scene. I was surrounded by magic; encircled by miracles. We don't usually think of a scene like that in those terms, but that's only because we've so used to seeing amazing things every day that we take them for granted.

And those are just everyday miracles; commonplace magic. Every week or so I'm treated to a something unusually miraculous. Not long ago I looked out my window before sunrise, and saw Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Mars, the Moon, and Jupiter lined up across the sky. Six other worlds, and I was looking right at them across millions of miles of space. Is that not incredible? And then, last week I was walking to work and saw a puddle with a thin skin of patterned ice on top. The ice crystals had grown from a single point in the middle of the puddle; radiating and branching outward in six directions like a giant snowflake. Countless water molecules--far more than all the people who have ever lived on earth--had been milling around in watery chaos, and then lined up in perfect rank and file to create a symmetrical pattern. Order had emerged from disorder, spontaneously, as the puddle cooled. It was a miracle, right there in a mud puddle. I stared at it, and thought about how an analogous process occurred at the birth of the universe, when the universe cooled and expanded, creating pockets of order that would become stars, galaxies, and eventually, trees and woodpeckers.

Now, some readers will object to me calling these things miracles, or magic. And I'll admit I'm using both words in a particular sense. According to Merriam-Webster Online, a miracle is "an unusual or wonderful event that is believed to be caused by the power of God". That's the first definition listed. I'm using the word in the sense of the second definition: "a very amazing or unusual event, thing, or achievement." Similarly, I'm not using the word "magic" in this most common sense: "a power that allows people (such as witches and wizards) to do impossible things by saying special words or performing special actions." I'm using it in a more metaphorical sense, as in "that was a magical sunset".

Most people who talk about miracles and magic have something very different in mind than I do, and different people prefer different words. The ones who talk about miracles are usually religious--they see miracles as acts of God that suspend the ordinary laws of nature: things like Jesus walking on water or rising from the dead. Magic, by contrast, is something that's more likely to be embraced by people in the New Age or occult movements. They're impressed by mysterious alleged phenomena that seem unexplained by science: auras, ESP, astrology, healing properties of crystals, spells, magical potions, and so on. In either case, the key point is that people are more impressed by alleged violations of natural law than by natural law itself. That's why they will probably find my examples of magic and miracles unsatisfying--a poor substitute for the real thing.

I have the opposite opinion. I think the kind of miracles and magic I'm talking about are FAR more impressive and awe-inspiring than accounts of people walking on water or reading minds. Why? Because they're demonstrably real. They clearly exist in the real world, and that, in my opinion, is a distinct advantage. Things like auras and resurrection do not clearly exist; at least not in any easily demonstrable way. If they were easy to demonstrate, people wouldn't think of them as miraculous or magical (in the usual sense of those terms). They would just be part of everyday life, and people would stop seeing the wonder in them, the way they've stopped seeing the wonder in ice crystals and the sun. We would have long ago started taking them for granted.

Of course, I can't prove that miracles and magic, in the sense of violations of natural law, don't exist. I can't prove that Jesus didn't walk on water, or that my being a Pisces tells me absolutely nothing about my personality or destiny, or that magic spells are useless. But I think these are fairly safe assumptions. I could get into why I think that, but that's a big topic that would make this post much too long, so I'll just touch on a couple of points.

First the "magical" things that impress New Agers and occultists: There is no good evidence that they work, and no known mechanism by which most of them could work. There's no force known to science that could explain how an arrangement of stars in the sky could influence your personality or destiny. There's no force known to science that could explain how crystals could heal you. Of course, it could be that they work because of forces science hasn't yet discovered, but there's no evidence for that, either, because there's no evidence that they work at all.

As for miracles, I look at reports of miracles in much the way David Hume did:

When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. 

In other words, which is more plausible--that a dead man came back to life, or that a few people mistakenly believed he did? How many times have you talked to someone who was mistaken? And how many times have you seen someone come back from the dead?

Another issue I want to raise about miracles is one noted by the philosopher James Keller. Lots of people believe that if someone makes an unexpected recovery from cancer, for example, it means God performed a miracle. But what about all the people who don't recover? Why would God single out one person to miraculously save, and let all the others die? Or, as Keller put it, "If God intervenes to save your life in a car crash, then what was he doing in Auschwitz?" If God cured your cancer, why didn't he do anything about the child rapes and terrorist attacks we read about in the papers?

As I said, though, this isn't the place to get into a deep discussion of the plausibility of miracles and magic. You could write a whole book about it, and others are better qualified than me. The point I want to make is about what we should think of as a miracle. What should we consider magical? Does something have to violate the laws of nature to merit our awe? I don't think it does. In fact, I think people all too often become blind to the real wonders in this world because they're looking for imagined ones.

One reason I know this is that I work in a public library. Every day, I help people find books on things like astrology, witchcraft, angels, ancient aliens, crystal healing, Nostradamus, demons, bigfoot and other things that are entirely at odds with a scientific understanding of the universe. If someone asks for books on astronomy, I can usually assume they really mean astrology, and don't know there's a difference. If they use the word "quantum", they almost always want some kind of New Age pseudoscience that has nothing to do with the actual science of quantum mechanics (again, they don't usually know the difference). And how often do people ask for actual science? Maybe once every six months. Maybe. If I do some very rough math, that means the general public is about 150 times as interested in alleged violations of natural law as they are in learning about natural law itself.

Why is this? Why is it that people are so much more excited about what is unexplained (and often completely made up) than what is explained? It's really bizarre, when you think about it. Consider this discussion of miracles by Thomas Aquinas:

an astronomer is not astonished when he sees an eclipse of the sun, for he knows the cause; whereas one who is ignorant of this science must needs wonder, since he knows not the cause. Wherefore it is wonderful to the latter but not to the former. Accordingly a thing is wonderful simply, when its cause is hidden simply: and this is what we mean by a miracle, to wit, that is wonderful in itself and not only in respect of this person or that. Now God is the cause which is hidden to every man simply: for we have proved above that in this state of life no man can comprehend Him by his intellect. 

Aquinas is defining a miracle as that whose cause is hidden to everyone, not just the ignorant. It's an interesting argument, and he was a brilliant man, but consider what he's saying in the first part of that quotation, "one who is ignorant of this science must needs wonder." Here wonder can mean two different things: to ponder how a thing can be, and to be amazed (it's telling that we use the same word for both). If we think of wonder as being amazed, then Aquinas is saying that the more ignorant people are about a thing, the more amazing they will find it. And he's right! That's usually how it works. Human nature is such that what we wonder about--what we are ignorant of--is what seems wonder-ful.

That's our natural impulse, but does it make sense? Why should things be more amazing the more ignorant we are about them? Why shouldn't knowing more about something make it even more amazing? For example, if I look up at the planet Saturn, and didn't know anything about it, all I would see is an unusually bright star. But when I read more about it, I discover its true wonders: how it has rings, colorful bands, and a whole litter of moons; how it rains helium there, and how hundreds of Earths could fit inside it. All these things make Saturn more amazing, not less. They make it more magical. More miraculous. Not because they violate any laws of nature, but because they show us how much more incredible it is than it seems when we first see that little bright dot in the sky.

What I want to ask with this post then, is whether we should reconsider what we think of as magical or miraculous. What if the real miracles aren't things that violate the laws of nature--it's not even clear that such things exist--but are instead the incredible things all around us; the things we've become so used to that we've forgotten how incredible they really are? What if the goal of spirituality isn't to find miracles and magic in the sense of violations of natural law, but to learn to see what's miraculous about the real world? If so, then the true magic--the real miracles--are the things that surround us every day of our lives.