Robers Armand

Ms. Cunningham
English 102
The Child’s Need for Magick
Who is the Author’s intended audience?
The author’s audience seems to be the conventional for an academic-the sort of Ivy-league effete
intellectuals that would take his pompous premise as a matter of course.
What is the point that the Author is trying to make?
The point I believe that he is trying to make is that children have an innately immature world
view, on e that revolved around using subjective experience and the imagination as a way of perceiving
the world and explaining the problems that they face as human beings. The author supposes as a matter of
course that imaginal thinking- believing in a world that is alive and responds to the needs or your
subjective mind-is a childish nonsensical point of view that humanity must became mature enough to get
past. The Author is saying that the magical viewpoint is a child’s plaything, that myth, spirituality and
religion are all projections of our human insecurities without the benefit of objective, rational thought,
which is what people who deal in actual reality deal with. All God represents is mankind’s need to a
Daddy figure, basically.
Is the author successful?
This pseudo-Freudian jargon makes the author trip over his own self importance, In my opinion.
Like most atheists, he willfully ignores the actual claims of the supports of the spiritual worldview- that
there is a repeatable, yet subjective, aspect to the way the human mind works that can have a clear
effective on the world at large. Spiritual entities have an objective component to their existence though
they also reside in the subjective portions of our perceptions. The author ignores the copious evidence of
actual spiritual abilities and paranormal events that have been documented. He also ignores evidence in
the fields of transpersonal psychology, anthropology, recent findings on the veracity of acupuncture and
the nature of the mystery of placebo factor, not to mention the findings of Russian scientist Vladimir
Vernadsky who verified the existence of the mystical energetic Kirilian aura. Like most atheists he is
willing to overly simplify the rationale of a viewpoint he disagrees with in order to be able to ignore it, a
classical Straw man fallacy.