Museums and Magic

The picture to the left is not the Philadelphia Art Museum. Rocky is not going to be running up these steps. But I use to run up these steps with a great deal of glee and anticipation. This is the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia just off Logan Square. It is full of science. I was quite serious about science as a child. I was doing my entomology collection, better known as insects in cigar boxes. I was studying herpetology for the fun of it. Herpetology is the study of reptiles; I especially liked snakes. I was not putting together a snake collection in cigar boxes. My grandmother and mother were not as fond of the creatures as I was.

My mother and grandmother took me to the Franklin Institute for my birthday. Electric trains and their accessories were on my annual Christmas List. Museums were my birthday wishes. Every year they took me to the big city for my birthday. We did all the museums. all fun to me from the Academy of Natural History (right) to the Egyptology Room of the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania.(left)

Philadelphia is full of such places. They were

The Egyptology Room was so cool. It had mummies.

I added another piece to my science repertoire after a visit to the Fels Planetarium – astronomy. I bought a book on the constellations and a small telescope and spent some nights peering at the heavens.

There was chemistry too. I was on my second ChemCraft set by the end of Fifth Grade. It was one of the larger kits. It even included experiments in Atomic Energy. Recently I saw on TV that the ChemCraft Atomic Energy set is considered the absolutely most dangerous toy ever sold because it contained real uranium. I never started glowing green as a result.

It’s a wonder I didn’t blow up the house.

Some of my friends took an interest in chemistry. Dave Fidler and his younger brother were two. The younger Fidler fiddled around a bit too much on one visit when his older brother wasn’t along. When he left I discovered some of my things, including some of my chemicals, were missing. I decided I didn’t want the younger Fidler visiting anymore.

But Dave (right) was a different story. He and I would try different mixtures together. The set came with an instruction booklet, a recipe book for budding young chemists. We grew tired of following these. We began to gather various products from about my home, cleaners, medicines and any old chemical in a bottle. We would mix these together in various ways just to see what would happen. This is a very dangerous practice. Many household products are toxic to begin with and some can be very dangerous if combined with others. We even occasionally heated our concoctions with wooden matches. We didn’t burn the house down, but we did discover “solid liquid”. That’s what we called it. I can’t remember what we mixed together in that test tube, but we got an odd result. It was a liquid; at least it looked like a liquid. It was yellowish in color, but you could see through it just like water. If you shook the test tube it swirled or splashed about like water, too. When you poured it out…well, you couldn’t pour it out. You could turn the tube upside down and shake, but the contents would not come out. It was as if it had solidified tightly inside the glass. Turn it right side up and it would shiver and shimmy like water again. We had to throw the tube away because we couldn’t get it out. It was like real magic.

This chemistry set came with a booklet called Chemical Magic. Wow, I was thrilled. Magic was another of my passions. I liked to watch magicians, but I was never satisfied being mystified. I wanted to know how they did it.

It wasn’t all that easy to find out. There was no Internet in those days and magicians guarded their secrets. I had to start small. I started early, too. My first step into this art was the Howdy Doody Magic Kit.

You could get this kit by sending 3 Three Musketeers candy bar wrappers and some money to Howdy.

The kit was made of cardboard. You punched the various pieces free and put them together. I could have used some magic to fit Tab A into Tab B, to tell the truth. It is probably no surprise, but one trick made three tiny boxes of Three Musketeers appear and disappear.

I practiced and put on a couple shows in the living room to a captive audience. Here I am, the Barefoot Magician performing the rabbit out of a hat trick. This is a very rare photo, not because it shows me performing, but because it is one of very few of the interior of 417 Washington Avenue.

The camera is looking from the living room toward the dining room. I am standing between those two rooms. The doorway behind me leads to the kitchen. To my left are the stairs upstairs. My mother collected salt and pepper shakers. She displayed them in the built-in case fronting the steps.

The chemical magic allowed me to add some neat tricks to my act, such as turning water to milk or wine and back.

It was an amazing illusion, but quite simple. All good magic tricks are simple. If not, it would be difficult for the magician to perform them and keep the method secret. Here is the basic water-changing routine. I would place a glass of clear water on the table. I passed a handkerchief  briefly over the glass and pulled it away to reveal water changing to milk. Another pass of the cloth and we had wine. We got our clear glass of water back after a third pass. The secret? As I passed the handkerchief I dropped a chemical powder into the glass. This reacted with the water causing it to cloud up and become opaque and white. A second chemical made the liquid clearer, but deep red like a wine. The third chemical counteracted the other two and turned the liquid back to clear water.

I would not have recommended drinking that milk or wine, however, or the water at the end.

I was convinced I was going to study science when I got to high school, especially chemistry. My teachers knocked those ambitions out of me. I think the school system destroys more children’s brains than it educates. If I truly had a magic wand I would change the whole education system from kindergarten through college. But I don’t and so our children remain victims of the teacher’s union, politicians and puffed-up pompous professors.

I eventually gave up on chemistry and science, but not on magic. Magic remained a lifelong hobby and I gathered a lot of books on the subject and sometimes performed tricks for people, especially card tricks.

One of my favorite tricks was very dramatic. I take a deck of cards, spread it in my hands and ask someone to pick a card from it. I lay the deck on the table and tell them to look at their  card, remember what it is and place it back atop the deck. I pick up the deck shuffle it, lay it on the table and cut it.I then ask another person to pick up the deck and begin to deal out the cards in a random fashion atop the table. I say deal out a dozen or so and just fling them face down here and there. Once this is done I take a knife, wave it over the cards and then stab one of the cards. I tell the first person to lift the card thus stabbed and tell if it was their selection.

Of course it is.

Well, actually, my execution wasn’t quite as dramatic. Once you stab a card with a knife that card is ruined. I couldn’t afford to keep buying decks so used a pencil and stabbed the card with the eraser end. I’d hold the pencil against the card until the person picked it up.

I was still doing magic forty-plus years later at Wilmington Trust. We in administration often sat and had coffee in the conference room before starting time. One morning I pulled out a deck of cards. I shuffled, lay the deck down and cut it. I told my boss, Walt (that's him in the foreground), to take the top card, then John and then Anne. I told them to lay their card face up on the table. Three different cards were showing. I then instructed them to go to their respective offices and lift their telephone. “You will find a sealed envelope with your name on it. Bring the envelope back here unopened.”

When they came back I told each to open the envelope and pull out the slip of paper inside. On each slip of paper was the name of the card they had picked.

Both of these tricks look amazing and puzzle the participants, but they are both quite simple. I’m not going to tell you how, though. Magicians don’t reveal their secrets.

Magic and God

I developed an interest in magic at a very young age. In the photo I am performing an act for my family at age 12. This was not my first such show. I had the Howdy Doody Magic Kit several years before this. I also did magic with chemicals about this same time. In fact I could produce some very Biblical effects such as changing water into wine and the wine into milk.

Over the years I learned a number of tricks as well as how most magicians pulled off their stage effects. Speaking of magicians one of my favorites, or I should say two, are Penn and Teller. These guys do some amazing stuff.

Teller, despite his name, never talks in public. Penn Jillette does all the blatter for the act. They have been performing together for the last 38 years, which is longer than a lot of people stay married these days.

Penn is the big one. He is six foot seven inches tall and has put on a few pounds over the years. Teller is the little guy, but very athletic, agile (especially for a 65-year old man) and adept at slight of hand.

I haven't brought these guys up to talk about Teller or magic. I want to talk about a difference in religious outlook between Penn Jillette and myself, and why I bring this up is because we share a childhood experience so similar it is almost magic in itself.

Penn Jillette, who is a very intelligent and fair minded man, a reasonable Liberal and someone who can discuss issues without rancor or ridicule is also an Atheist and a vocal one. He wrote a book promoting his Atheistic views called, God, No!. We'll come back to that book in a bit. But first, Penn Jillette has explained how he became an Atheist this way.

As a boy, he tells us, his parents forced him to go to church, which he didn't like. He made a deal with his parents. He would join the church youth group if they did not force him to go to church. In youth group he began to argue with the others about the Scriptures. The minister originally encouraged him, suggesting he read the Bible, advise Penn took so he was better equipped to make his arguments. He did this until the minister suggested to his parents he should no longer come to the group. Penn asserts it was reading the Bible that turned him Atheist and insists anyone who read the Bible from cover to cover would also become an Atheist.

Now as a boy my parents forced me to go to church. I didn't like going. When I got a driver's license I made a deal with my folks. I would go to Sunday School, but not church. They agreed. I later switched from this to MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship). I even was elected President of the youth group. As such I started a series of discussions in which I claimed I would play Devil's Advocate just for the sake of argument. However, I wasn't playing. I was trying to attack Scripture. I wasn't asked to leave youth group. I was actually praised for making meetings so interesting that attendance grew. Like Penn Jillette I did eventually become an Atheist and a vocal one. But unlike Penn Jillette I am now a Born Again Christian. I have also read the Bible cover to cover, several times, and doing so has not turned me back to being an Atheist. I obviously did not see the content of Scripture that same way Penn says he saw it.

I do want to mention Penn Jillette's intro to his book, God, No!.

First let me say if you are going to do anything as extreme as kill your child because God told you to do it, you better be really, really, really sure it was God. And I'm going to tell you right here that if some voice told you this it wasn't God.

I have three children. They should not be here. My wife was told, assured, exhorted to even forget the idea, because she could never possibly have a child. She had all ready lost seven. But by the mercy of God she had three. I also want to point out that her having these children was not what turned me from Atheist to Christian. No, the first of these children came over a year after I turned to Christ. These miracles didn't lead me to believe in God, they simple confirmed it.

God is not going to ask me to kill any of my children.

Now I believe such a thing happened once to a man named Abraham. I admit, I have not memorized the Bible, so perhaps there is another such case I somehow forgot, but I think there was only Abraham. Abraham was told by God to take his son, the one promised by God to Abraham and his wife Sarah, his seed and her egg, and sacrifice the lad.

There are foreshadowings here pointing to the coming of Christ, God's only begotten son, who would be sacrificed for men, but unlike Christ, Isaac did not die. God told Abraham to stop as he prepared his son for death. In the film, "The Bible" on the History Channel, when God tells Abraham to take Isaac and sacrifice the boy, Abraham asks, "Why Lord, haven't I proved my faith enough."

Well, no, he hadn't. Abraham was promised a son by God, but instead of having faith this would happen, he took Sarah's advice and had a child by her maidservant, a boy named Ishmael. Ishmael would prove a thorn in Israel's side until this very day. So Abraham had not proven his faith at all by that act. His willingness to sacrifice Isaac did.

So you might ask, why wouldn't God ask the same of me. Well, for one thing God never told me to move from one place to another. God did not physically come visit my home, sit down to dinner and promise my wife she would have children. I never stood with God and argued with him about what he was going to do to some city (Reference Genesis 18). If you read the Bible cover to cover you will find God dealt with human kind in different ways at different times.

There is another reason. God talked with Abraham before the Law was given to Moses. That came a few hundred years later. The essence of the Law is the Ten Commandments. Although with the Resurrection of Christ many of the Mosaic Laws became moot, the Ten Commandments remains as valid now as then. One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou Shall Not Murder".

You see, my problem is not that love and morality are more important to me than my faith, because I am a human and to tell the truth my love and morality are not always what they should be. This is one of the reasons I needed forgiveness and salvation in the first place. No, it is that my faith in the mercy and justice of God is so strong that I know he would never ask one to break his own commandments. Thus I know God would never tell me to murder my children any more than he would tell me to seduce my neighbor's wife.

Now Penn Jillette says that reading the Bible cover to cover would make anyone an Atheist. He has said:

"I think because what we get told about the Bible is a lot of picking and choosing, when you see, you know, Lot's daughter gang raped and beaten, and the Lord being okay with that; when you actually read about Abraham being willing to kill his son, when you actually read that; when you read the insanity of the talking snake; when you read the hostility towards homosexuals, towards women, the celebration of slavery; when you read in context, that "thou shalt not kill" means only in your own tribe—I mean, there's no hint that it means humanity in general; that there's no sense of a shared humanity, it's all tribal; when you see a God that is jealous and insecure; when you see that there's contradictions that show that it was clearly written hundreds of years after the supposed fact and full of contradictions.  I think that anybody... you know, it's like reading The Constitution of the United States of America. It's been... it's in English. You know, you don't need someone to hold your hand. Just pick it up and read it. Just read what the First Amendment says and then read what the Bible says. Going back to the source material is always the best."

What I see is Penn picking and choosing from the Bible. When you do take the Bible in context from beginning to end you see these things, slavery, prejudice, hostility, war are the things of men not following the directions of God. God works within the framework of the real world, pointing us to what is better and right. Take for instance the statement, "When you see, you know, Lot's daughter gang raped and beaten, and the Lord being okay with that."  Really? Really? First of all, the offering of Lot's daughters (See genesis 19) to the mob came from Lot. This was a man's solution to the problem and the kind of wrong-headed thing we do when we take things into our own hands (just like Abraham and Hager producing Ishmael). The facts are that Lot's daughters were not gang raped and beaten. They were rescued, along with Lot and his family from that situation by the grace of God. God was not approving of such behavior. God destroyed Sodom for such behaviors.

I believe in God and Penn Jillette does not. I do not dislike Penn because of this. He has a God-given right to believe what he believes as do I. He says when he became an Atheist there were about 9% of Americans sharing his belief and now there are 20% and he calls Atheism "the fastest growing religion in America".  So we have twenty-percent who believe there is no God. So fine, for then if we take Penn's quote above they are left with no God, just rape and beatings and hostility and slavery and war and crime and all the other miseries that mankind inflicts upon itself and without hope. 

I have something even better than hope. I have faith.