Author(s): Tracy King

mind spirit religion philosophy

Poverty and superstition go hand in hand, a way to reconcile the unfairness of the universe. How else can you explain why some families have everything and some have nothing? Tracy King was raised in a house of contradictions. Her home was happy and creative but it was marked by debt, by her father’s alcoholism and her mother’s agoraphobia. When her father died at the hands of a local teenage gang on the streets of their Midlands council estate, superstition gave way to a deeper and more dysfunctional reliance on the born-again Christian church to which Tracy and her family belonged. In the chaos of loss, the paranormal became paranoia. In a bid to find definitive answers, Tracy followed one belief system after another. After accepting then rejecting spiritualism, witchcraft, and eventually conspiracy theories, she accidentally stumbled across a book by scientist Carl Sagan. It opened the door to a world of critical thinking, scientific thinking. Ultimately, it taught her to think for herself. Learning to Think is a memoir about belief. It’s about poverty, religion and superstition, grief and healing. But most of all, it’s about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world.