The whole point of Lewis Ungit’s essay, “The Real Problem with Magic: How Magic is Both Greater and Lesser Than Most People Think,” is this: experience’s such as Shermers exist because an unseen supernatural dimension exists where intelligent beings not visible to our eyes or audible to our ears exist. So anyone who has such experiences is receiving them from intelligent beings, some of them good, some of them evil.
Materialists like Carl Sagan are most generally people who fear these intelligences and prefer to live in denial of them even if that means denying their own souls, a foolish situation that has them running to and fro in search of an empirical cause of their own consciousness.
Psychics, mediums, Wiccans, New Agers, and occultists in general admit the existence of these intelligences and reach out to them, generally because they want knowledge that is power or perhaps because someone they love has died and they are desperate for contact.
Todays internet and TV psychics want popularity and power. Most of them are frauds, but a few are not. None of this prevented Hillary Clinton from turning to the services of psychics.
Buddha was not a fraud. When he emptied his mind during Vipasana meditation, voices spoke into his mind. On one such occasion a voice told him men have no souls.
“There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable (unchangeable) truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent moral absolutes…We, of course, say that we do not believe in God (and) eternal morality. That is moral that serves the destruction of the old society. Everything is moral which is necessary for the annihilation of the old exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat.” (John Dewey, The Unseen Hand, A. Ralph Epperson, p. 298, 378-379)
From Buddha to Greek Atomists (materialists) on to contemporary materialists, thence to Marx, John Dewey, and Yuval Harari this ancient teaching from the unseen supernatural dimension has a very wide audience of Westerners and Americans who deny the existence of the Triune God, heaven, hell, angels, demons, and their souls because they deny the existence of the unseen supernatural dimension.
@LindaKimball
John Dewey’s words make him a Commie and for that he should have been shown the door, not made head of education. There is nothing that would “unite the proletariate” but an almighty State posing as an almighty God.
The Statists of course would always have their own power and self- serving interests in mind since thy have no (bourgoise) conscience to guide them. That would be an enforced evil – to “do what thou wilt” according to the satanist Anton Levey.
Communism is the subversion of God’s Will to carry out Man’s own ill will – under Satan, not God.
Magic? That’s for those heedless of the peril they bring to their own souls, also by Satan. Damnation is sure to follow.