One can be deeply influenced by people to whom one is utterly hostile.

We also have to bear in mind that our own sense of what is plausible and implausible is severely limited by the fact that the modern world is dominated by an extremely narrow range of family arrangements. Looking in anthropology books on kinship and marriage is like opening a book on a huge variety of dead and dying languages, all victims of the inexorable homogenisation of the world that has been in progress since the dawn of civilisation.

Since people of necessity see things from their own perspective, much of what they say adds up to comforting ideas or outright propaganda for themselves and the groups to which they belong.

It’s remote! It’s remote! It’s uncontaminated! It’s pure! It’s a place where we can rule out that Muhammad got his ideas from others than God!

Reincarnation offers a better justification of evil than anything monotheism can offer, but it does so by blaming the victim and sanctifying the status quo.

The fact that the doctrine makes perfect sense even though Epiphanius keeps finding it incoherent suggests that he is giving a faithful account of it.

It is probably safe to say that in strongly hierarchical societies the only people to whom something approaching nationalist sentiments can be attributed in pre-modern times is the ruling elite, and then only at times.

ideas generate action when they are believed regardless of whether they are true or not in our opinion

we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.

One can be deeply influenced by people to whom one is utterly hostile