Yes, I realize that the way I defined magic isn't necessarily the same as everyone else's veiwpoint on it. To me, anything that is of a supernatural origin would fall under the catagory of magic, of course, but anything unexplainable but caused by natural forces I would catagorize as magic also.

With regard to your inquiry of if I would call the existence of planets magical, I would say no. Though I don't understand the exact mechanisms, true, I have enough of a physical background to understand the forces at work in their creation and I could formulate testable hypotheses and theorys. However, this is just dealing with the more immediate creation -- if this question is referring to the ultimate origin of the planets then, by my definition, I could indeed call that magic. After all, I have absolutely no clue where the matter to form the planets came from or the how the very start of the universe that we know it came into being.

However, for the purposes of this post, from here down I will refer to magic in only the sense of supernatural phenomenon.

To address your comment regarding how magic and sufficiently advanced technology are not equivalent and only that indistinguishable from each other, I agree with this completely using your definition of magic. After all, if magic is of the supernatural only, then regardless of how advanced a technology is the best that it could do would be mimic this supernatural phenomenon. So I have no disagreement with this point.

Similarily, I agree that currently things such as telepathy has not and does not exist reliably currently and that if one day it worked in the way that I mentioned then it would have nothing to do with superstition or magic whatsoever. The main focus of that argument is that something which may be perceived as magic now (if it existed reliably, which it doesn't) may very well have a purely natural reason behind it, however complex.

Finally, with regard to your last paragraph, I made no attempt to suggest that a belief in modern telepathy or astrology explains anything. However, some people (hopefully few) may believe that another person's mental telepathic powers are to blame for everything that they do wrong. In such a case, that person would be attempting to explain something (and passing the blame off themselves too) uses such superstitious ideas. Of course, I'm certainly not going to defend that this may be the case -- after all, I'm in complete agreement with your view on people that believe such things. In no way do I suggest that such beliefs make better and more accurate claims than science -- just that people may cling to those ideas as explainations because it 'feels good' to them (which would be why they would try to resist all evidence to the contrary).

-Ka"I must say, this certainly is quite the interesting thread"z!