Debbie Foster

We want to be reconciled, somehow, to loss and failure, injustice and human suffering. We are hoping for a truth that will take the edge off our despair.

The rise of trance, spirit possession, and pastor-shamans is not a fluke in a shamanless end of history. It is a predictable outcome of an unfettered race to provide spiritual relief.

Political corruption, instability, and conflict are the natural results of the abandonment of reason.

regardless of its content, the thinking process presupposes the identity of the thinker, and thereby imposes the parameters of selfhood on whatever it addresses.

When humans use language, the boundary between fact and fiction can be indistinct. Each of us sees the world through a different lens, so our words are inevitably grounded in a bespoke version of reality. A narrative that is fact to one person can seem like fiction to another, and vice versa. Even a supposedly impartial journalist describing an

The take-home point of this and the rest of Bem’s studies is that our behavior seems to be conditioned not only by what we have learned or been exposed to in the past but also, to some small but significant extent, by what we will learn or be exposed to in the future.

There is nothing more beautiful than a formal system with axioms that are perfectly internally consistent. Such systems can be right, and they can be wrong, but that is beside the point. The beauty is that there is no room for bias or prejudice, no tolerance for interference.

Although stories have always had morals and underlying purposes (as in fairy tales and fables), the explicit requirement of codebreaking is very much a post-Freudian, modern phenomenon. We are being asked to read novels in a novel way.

… the more foreign a state is from normal behavior, the more it demonstrates special powers and supernatural contact. A shaman who chitchats with an audience in their everyday voice is likely to be considered a fraud. One who thrashes violently, speaks in a strange voice, and then doesn't remember anything afterward is more conceivably doing