I do believe in magic. I just don't believe it's real.
Let me put it this way. In another thread I'm talking about neurotransmitters. I've had very high dopamine for a very long time from taking very high doses of fish oil. Unlike having high dopamine from street drugs, high dopamine from fish oil doesn't impair the rational faculties--if anything, omega-3 fatty acids make one smarter. And unlike with schizophrenia, it's not a disease. I'm simply following the healthy diet we evolved on as humans, of a very well-fed hunter-gatherer. I happen to like being this way, the orgasms in particular. I work hard to stay in this brain state.
I am using myself as an extreme guinea pig and I'm taking higher doses of fish oil than I recommend to women. This has amplified a tendency that I have had since I was a child, of seeing another realm overlaying this one. There is an uncanny feeling of "walking with God," and it's hard to ignore the direct evidence of one's senses. In this realm astrology is very accurately predictive, and I use it much like a weather report. I know, for example that when the moon is opposing my natal Saturn, there will be a heaviness in my day, a mild depression and fatigue, and I can plan ahead.
I can mitigate these effects by increasing my serotonin level, but then I lose the orgasms.
It also explains why certain odd things happened in my past, which I posted a couple years ago so I've heard all the rational arguments as to why they were just coincidence, that when I cursed my ex-husband within hours a tree fell on his car, that I woke up in a cold sweat yelling on the morning of 9/11 from a dream that bad men were coming here to die, that my grandmother came to visit me and my aunt when she was in a coma and dying.
And then finally there's the tantric sex. I've had at least forty orgasms a day most days for the past six years or so, and I've had some remarkable physiological changes from that. I am firmly convinced these results are caused simply by the nervous system reacting in a certain way to certain stimulus, but aside from normal vaginal and clitoral orgasms, I also have orgasms centered in the chest and in the forehead that have very odd spiritual sensations that accompany the physical pleasure, and also once I had the very unusual experience of having an orgasm at the top of my head which was certainly a religious experience--I lost all sense of self, felt at one with the cosmos, lost track of time, it lasted about fifteen minutes. I know some drugs can produce a similar effect, it's purely physiological, but it's hard to just dismiss that out of hand, especially when the experience was clearly the natural experience of a healthy body. Our bodies are built to have these higher chakra orgasms.
So putting all that together, it certainly doesn't meet the definition of extraordinary claims require extraordinary truth, but from my point of view it would be irrational not to be openminded about such things, particularly when the health and psychological benefits of belief are so good. Having the conviction that one has some power over the universe is an encouraging thing, even if in my beliefs it's an alternate universe, that only obliquely touches the real one.