Paranormal explanations of NDEs generally refer to the dualistic view of the world. These explanations are built upon the belief or derived from the credo that NDEs can be explained through paranormal concepts.

Chapter 2 explores the developmental psychology of metaphor and its significance for illness experience. While semiotics of medicine implies a simple link between physiological processes and symptom reports, illness experience is articulated through metaphors that are grounded in bodily experience, social interaction, discourse, and cultural practices. Bodily grounding of metaphor is based on sensorimotor equivalences, as seen early in development in synesthesia and cross-modal analogies. Social grounding resides in the pragmatics of language in which context and goals depend on social roles, norms, and cultural meaning. Despite this, metaphors allow for creative play by requiring only piecemeal correspondences to the world through ostension. The meaning of metaphors is then found not in representation but in presentation. Clinical examples illustrate a patient on dialysis refusing a blood transfusion and a woman with medically unexplained floating sensations, showing how a semantics of metaphor can clarify the tensions between the essential irrationality of illness experience and the biomedical presumption of rationality in normative accounts of illness cognition and behavior.

In this chapter, we focus on specific new Western religious movements, frequently referred to as cults, but that also might be termed “destructive” religious movements. "Destructive" elements include deceptive recruiting techniques, attempts to exert significant control over the minds and behavior of followers, abuse of followers, criminal activity, and violence or harm (including suicide) toward followers or others. A case vignette is presented, illustrating how the Branch Davidians under the leadership of Vernon Howell (AKA David Koresh) typified many of the characteristics of a Western religious cult. Common characteristics of leaders of Western religious cults are discussed, along with tactics commonly utilized by leaders to gain followers and to maintain control over followers. Common characteristics of followers are also discussed, and some prevalent myths about followers are dispelled. Psychological principles are discussed to the extent that they may shed light on the group and individual dynamics in play that may have contributed to some of the highly destructive outcomes that have occurred in some of these movements.

This chapter investigates one-person decision problems under uncertainty. The main building block is that of a conditional preference relation: a mapping that assigns to every belief about the states a preference relation over the decision maker’s choices. Under certain conditions, such a conditional preference relation admits an expected utility representation, which allows us to summarize the conditional preference relation by a finite utility matrix. Throughout the book it is assumed that the conditional preference relation indeed has an expected utility representation.

Understand how children direct their own learning and learn from others; describe the importance of imitation, play, and instruction; explain how children transfer what they know across different contexts.

This chapter argues that beliefs are causally effective representational states. They admit of two main kinds: episodic and semantic forms of memory. These are argued to be distinct, although they have overlapping origins. The chapter also discusses the states often described as beliefs that result from one making up one’s mind (forming a judgment), but many of which are really commitments (a type of intention). The relations between episodic memory and imagination are also discussed. The chapter then examines the idea that moral judgments can be directly motivating, showing that it contains an element of truth. Finally, the chapter critiques a claim that has become popular among armchair-philosophers, that knowledge is a basic kind of intrinsically factive mental state.

Chapter 4, ‘The Efficacy of Empirical Vision’, argues that physical sight can and should lead to belief in John. Scholars often cite John 2:23; 4:48; and 20:29 as evidence for John’s own critique of physical seeing as a means of coming to belief. The chapter argues that close reading of John 2:23 and 4:48 reveals human hearts to be the true cause of unbelief and shows that physical sight is the catalyst for all unbelief and all belief. Neither does John 20:29 condemn sight as a means of acquiring belief. Rather, it suggests that mediated seeing – via the text of the Gospel – can be as efficacious for belief as an actual encounter with Jesus. The chapter concludes that sight is complex, but that no critique of the positive relationship between sight and belief exists in John.

Chapter 1, ‘My Lord and My God’ in John 20:30–31’, asserts that the cause, content, and consequences of belief all suggest that Jesus is God. In John 20:27–29, Thomas sees Jesus and calls him ‘my Lord and my God’. After Jesus blesses those who believe without seeing him, John claims that he has written down signs in this book so that his readers can come to believe that ‘Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God’ and ‘receive life in his name’ (John 20:30–31). The proximity of both statements is not coincidental but reveals that 20:30–31 describes the same fullness of belief as Thomas’s exclamation. What emerges is that John’s portrayals of the ‘signs’, the titles ‘Christ’ and ‘Son of God’, and the resulting ‘life in his name’ are fundamentally theological. True belief will always make Thomas’s declaration.

The introduction raises the question of how one ought to understand the challenge of God’s invisibility/visibility in the Fourth Gospel with regard to its stated purpose: ‘These things are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.’ Scholars and theologians have often taken God’s invisibility to be ‘absolute’, in the sense that it describes an immaterial, eternal God whose deity is invisible by nature. While John claims that no one has ever seen God, it also describes God as incarnate in Jesus Christ, the one in whom the Father may be seen. The introduction shows that scholars have not yet satisfactorily defined the nature of divine invisibility in John nor reckoned with the import of this important theme for John’s purpose. It proposes that, according to John, God must become physically visible in Jesus in order for belief to obtain.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

Lucian’s position as a commentator on religion has been debated intensely since late antiquity: for most of the last two millennia, it has been the main focus for commentators. This is primarily due to Lucian teasing Christians in a couple of places (although in fact they get off relatively lightly); but he is also, and indeed much more insistently, scathing about aspects of Greco-Roman ‘paganism’. This chapter begin by unpicking some of this reception history, and showing how modern scholarly perspectives remain locked into nineteenth-century cultural-historical narratives (which were designed to play ‘Hellenism’ off against ‘Christianity’, in various forms). It then argues that we should set aside the construct of Lucian’s status as a religious ‘outsider’— a legacy of nineteenth-century thinking — and consider Lucian instead as an agent operating within the field of Greek religion, and contributing richly (albeit satirically) to ongoing, vital questions over humans’ relationship with the divine. He should be ranged, that is to say, alongside figures like Aristides, Pausanias, and Apuleius as keen observers of the religious culture of the time.