But a capacity for empathy and compassion is not the same thing as an inevitable practice of that -- I don't see how that's magic. I don't believe in anything more than a random mutation of genes, and before that a random accumulation of molecules that tended to get more complex, and before that the explosion of some elements in a void. I'm a materialist, myself.

Somehow, though, that (ha, ha -- the song playing now is Eminem -- "Will the Real Slim Shady Please Stand Up?" and just said "we ain't nothing but mammals"... I like coincidence) that doesn't really conflict with my appreciation of the universe as feeling somehow bigger than my own consciousness. I don't need a superior being for that, but I've liked some of the transcendentalist interpretations of that, e.g. the Emerson. It all seems like metaphor to me. Also, I'm often sympathetic to metaphoric magic, which is how I see a lot of the Pagan/Wiccan impulses.