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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7839848" data-attributes="member: 996">They're all beliefs about what's goin' on inside your body that makes you, well, alive.So if you're watching a martial arts demonstration and the Aikidoka explains that he 'seized control of the ki flow between them' to perform a no-touch throw, that doesn't make it magic.  You can believe (as I did in that instance) that it was just that his student's muscle memory and expectations led him to safely rolling into a fall that hadn't actually been initiated by an outside force.So if a traditional legend has it that Qi is involved in cutting arrows, and a modern video has someone cutting arrows without any CGI or the like, well, cutting arrows, probably not magical, beliefs about Qi notwithstanding.So, that thing where you reverse what someone said, to try to illustrate that it's arbitrary, it only works if it was arbitrary. Look up "orientalism."The idea that the "Other" would have supernatural powers, or believe in supernatural powers in an irrational/pervasive way is just a bit of cultural centrism.Sure, yeah, the third one is not like the other two, because it's backed up by SCIENCE!  ...OK, repeatable experiments, & peer review......now, Orientalism, OTOH, would have us assume that Qi is not like the humors, because of it's Otherness.Thus supernatural, a word very much in our vocabulary, because we do tend to have such a worldview.The real world we live in does not have any sort of magical or supernatural phenomenon going on.  It boasts a lot of beliefs and speculation and even anecdotes about such things, but they're never demonstrable/repeatable.</blockquote>

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