Listen to the insults being flung around in the political controversies of the present day – the thieving rich, the shiftless poor, and the rest of it – and notice how many of them amount to claims that wealth that ought to belong to one group of people is being unfairly held by another.

A glance back over our past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause but by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power.

Thus the tired fantasy of cheap, abundant nuclear power needs to be buried alongside the Eisenhower-era propagandists who dreamed it up in the first place.

We cannot experience the world, even for an instant, without experiencing it through some myth, some narrative structure that sorts out our experiences and gives them meaning to us.

Concorde fallacy,” the conviction that it’s less wasteful to keep on throwing money into a failing project than to cut your losses and do something else.

The second half of the twentieth century in Japan saw the birth of scores of new religions – a phenomenon to which the Japanese have applied the appealing label kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods.

Is insisting that one can only be saved by the best possible god so different from insisting that one will only ride in the best possible car?

There are two common and complementary mistakes, which have been made over and over again concerning spirits by people in the Western world. The first of these is the orthodox Christian habit of assuming that all spirits are malevolent, dishonest and evil; the second is the corresponding habit, common in many New Age circles nowadays, of assuming that all spirits are loving, wise and good. Both of these attitudes are as foolish when applied to spirits as they would be if applied to human beings.

There’s a rich irony, in other words, in the insistence that magical thinking is less useful than scientific thinking, because magical thinking is exactly the form of human thought that deals with the realm of motivations, values, and goals that scientific thinking handles so poorly.

Questions about what counts as knowledge are at the heart of most dissensions about religion.