The Ursula-Jafar Theory of Bad Magic

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Are you a good magician, or a bad magician? This week, I start diving into the weird and complicated world of magic, from Disney to the Book of Acts. There's lots to say here, but let's start with what we want to avoid, namely: stealing people's voices and usurping the throne. In a deep cut from back when Disney wasn't awful, I hereby present: the Ursula-Jafar Theory of Bad Magic.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Young Heretics where today I would like to introduce to you the Ursula Jafar theory of bad magic. Some of you out there, like me, are old enough to remember that Disney actually used to be really good. I know this is way back in the before
0:26.6	times it's been memory-holed I realize that Oceania has always been at war with East Asia, but if like me you are one of the venerable
0:36.5	ancients who was there when the deep magic was written, you will recall that
0:42.2	Disney movies did not only and always used to be
0:46.2	exclusively a source for social issues and maximal leftism. they actually used to be modern retellings of core fairy tales and in that they actually did kind of evoke and bring up some of these ancient or traditional ideas that are contained in those folk stories
1:08.0	and that actually go way way back not just to before Disney but to like before the modern era.
1:13.2	A lot of them come from the Grimm's fairy tales,
1:16.0	but they also draw on other stuff as well.
1:19.7	And actually, the Ursula Jafar theory of bad magic that I am about to present to you is, I think, a pretty helpful way into addressing this issue that we've been dealing with for a while now which is about science and magic and how to do
1:35.9	science well ethically maybe even gloriously to the glory of God versus how to do it badly and how to tell the difference
1:45.9	because obviously this is a desperately urgent issue in our moment People are talking about putting chips into brains. They're
1:55.8	talking about constructing entire fantasy universes that you can immerse yourself in and
2:00.9	lose yourself to.
2:02.6	And there's a lot of dumerism,
2:04.8	a lot of catastrophism about the digital age.
2:07.1	There's also a lot of weird kind of messianic
2:10.0	salvationism.
2:11.2	And last week I covered why the stakes of that are so high and then I talked
2:16.2	using some of the kind of primary texts of text of the scientific revolution I talked about why this effort at you know
2:24.7	remaking the world with science is actually an effort to do magic to gain control
2:30.4	over what we've been seeking for all of human history which is the logic of
2:34.9	cause and effect and to call that magic is to kind of invoke all these weird things
	...

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