If you ever get the chance to happen upon a street magician doing his thing, stop to watch for a bit. There’s a lot to be learned from their act. I like the card tricks, and of course the classic three upside-down cups with one covering something — the way they whirl the cups around and stare you in the face.

I figured out shortly after my first encounter with a street magician that it didn’t matter what was in the cup, it didn’t even matter if you watched the cup really hard. It slowly dawned on me that focusing on any one thing would make you lose and that meant forfeiting money you put down to play.

Then I realized something else; the magician wasn’t working alone. When I would win or help someone else to win, there was always someone who would ask me to leave or give me a hard time. As I focused on the game less, I started noticing more that there was always someone around to provide a needed distraction if the chips were down and the magician was struggling. They were plants — people that were planted there to help the magician.

Glenn Beck and others put forward that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and as soon as the American public loses interest in that, the cup will slam back down. Another will whirl forward to reveal the next thing, as the last cup seamlessly moves back. All the while, Beck will stare you in the face and smile. As soon as you start to figure the game out, something or someone will distract you — the plants rarely miss their cues.

When something is so arbitrarily exchanged, it doesn’t matter. “How can you say that religion doesn’t matter when it comes to the president?” I know, it’s crazy to think like that isn’t it? Or is it?

There is a fallacy referred to as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy — “after this, therefore because of this” — think faulty cause-and-effect arguments. This fallacy makes people believe that a person of their same religion will be better suited to lead them and also will tell you that there is a cause and effect between a president’s religious beliefs and public opinion.

I would put forward that most Christians don’t understand their own religion. To most people, religion is just a dogma passed down to them from their parents. If they don’t understand their own religion, how can they be expected to understand a religion like Islam? If they don’t and are rejecting something they don’t understand, aren’t they just being xenophobic? It doesn’t matter if they understand, does it? Only what they think. Why do they think what they think? History shows that few bend their will to real critical thinking in the way that so few philosophers have guided so many. People think what they think because other people tell them what to think.

If religion really mattered to people, it wouldn’t have just started mattering to the extent that people say it does now — unless, as I assert, outside influences are using sleight of hand to make them think it matters. Let’s say it does matter, fundamentally, and all of the people who think Obama is a Muslim now thought he was a Muslim during the election. Sure, there were those that did, and made a fuss, but I can’t seem to remember hearing a general outcry about it. It was almost like it didn’t matter, and that we were trying to elect a man based on his own merits. That’s why Obama won the election by a landslide 365 to 173 electoral votes.

In recent times the issue of our presidents’ religion has come to the forefront; the cup spins deftly out, rises to show something to do with our president’s religion underneath. I’m not sure what will be next when the cup is snapped back to the magician and another is put forward, but when that happens, the new thing will “really matter.”

I do know that when trying to establish a cause-and-effect relationship, the cause must be something concrete — it can’t be something that can be changed at the drop of a hat. 

When it can be, it’s not cause and effect, it’s a magic trick. You’re being hoodwinked.

This time in our nation’s history, when our first black president was flagrantly ad hominem, will be looked back on with more than just a tinge of shame — and why calling someone a Muslim was used as an ad hominem will be considered as well.