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Realistically…
Realistically, odds are that there’s no such thing as magic, there are no deities or similar higher entities actually willing and able to directly influence our lives, our thoughts don’t have palpable effects on their own, prayers don’t get answered, wishes don’t get granted, there is no grand design and no purpose outside the one we choose or create ourselves, and all other such things that we believe in just to make our miserable existence more bearable are equally false. And if somehow they are not false, odds are that we still need to work for them, go through extensive training and perform exhausting rituals to correctly use that magic or those thought patterns in order to create the reality we seek, or wish and pray in very specific ways, perhaps make the necessary sacrifices and in all other ways prove that we are worthy of being selected for a divine intervention out of the billions of others with desperate needs and passionate desires.
We believe that it’s possible otherwise, that miracles can simply happen, that the blind forces of chance will just decide to work in our favor sooner or later, that spiritual guardians or other similar entities advise and protect us, that wise and benevolent entities put the current obstacles in front of us for our own good, or perhaps simply that something better awaits us on the other side, at the end of this miserable physical existence, merely because we have to, because otherwise the world would be even more hopeless and depressing than it is now. Thankfully, some of us are rational enough to realize this and act accordingly, seeing these beliefs as options that can’t be clearly ruled out and doing what we can to live according to those of them we deem suitable for us as long as by doing so we don’t harm or otherwise significantly hamper ourselves or others, yet many are either unable or unwilling to do so and end up either striving to impose their unproven and likely unrealistic beliefs on others and harming or even killing those who try to resist or, quite the contrary, unnecessarily accepting a fate worse than the one they’d be able to forge for themselves if only they thought it possible.
If and when we, or at least most of us, will realize this and start taking our beliefs for what they are instead of either what we stubbornly and senselessly wish them to be or what, perhaps even more stubbornly and senselessly, most of us have been taught they should be, there may yet be some hope left for us… Or, quite the contrary, nothing but an endless pit of despair when we realize that there is no hope, no purpose, no explanation and overall no answer, or at least none that we’d be able to accept and live with, to our most important questions, desperate pleas or fervent prayers. But that’s how life is and we have used our beliefs to hold ourselves and each other back for far too long, so this is the risk we’ll have to take if we are to ever move forward.