Quotes from Scott Atran

Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. —FRANCIS BACON

Los valores sagrados solo acostumbran adquirir una fuerte relevancia cuando son desafiados, de la misma manera que los alimentos adquieren un valor acuciante solo cuando no se tiene acceso a ellos.

In theocratic societies, adherence to fundamentalism may enhance the fitness of fundamentalists, as opposed to nonfundamentalists, because fundamentalists are more likely to obtain productive resources and have successful offspring, whereas nonfundamentalists are less likely to have access to productive resources and more likely to be punished or killed. It is not likely, however, that natural selection has had the time to cause the difference. Conversely

One such evolutionary system, or ridge, encompasses panhuman emotional faculties, or affective "programs." These include the basic, or primary, emotions that Darwin first identified: surprise, fear, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, and perhaps contempt. Certain reactions characteristic of the neurophysiology of surprise and fear are already evident in reptiles, and the other primary emotions are at least apparent in monkeys and apes.

Roughly, religion is a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception. […] The more one accepts what is materially false to be really true, and the more one spends material resources in displays of such acceptance, the more others consider one's faith deep and one's commitment sincere.

For my purposes, the differences among animistic, pantheistic, and monotheistic religions can be ascribed to differences in the content of beliefs in the supernatural, not to differences in the cognitive structure of those beliefs.

All religions, I claim, involve counterintuitive beliefs in supernatural beings. Moreover, such beliefs are systematically counterintuitive in the same basic ways. As we shall see, these basic ways of entertaining supernatural beliefs are more or less predictable from a fairly limited set of species-specific cognitive structures. These

During the first year of life, a child acquires the concept of teleomechanical agency: the child is able to perceive an object's physical movement as goal-directed. In the second year, the child develops comprehension of mentalistic agency: the child attributes internal, mental states, such as perception and desire, to actors in predicting or explaining their actions.

Around the start of the fourth year, the child begins to elaborate an understanding of metarepresentational agency: the child attributes intentional attitudes, such as belief and pretense, to people's representations of the world. Only then can children examine whether their and other people's thoughts about the world are true or fictive, likely or incredible, exaggerated or imprecise, worth changing one's mind for or forgetting.

In sum, the great apes arguably man1 ifest at least some aspects of teleomechanical agency and mentalistic agency (Suddendorf and Whiten 2001); however, there is no convincing evidence that any animals other than humans possess metarepresentational agency (Heyes 1998; C. Wynne 2001).

In religious thought, a person may ride a horse into the sky (Mohammed), ascend to heaven in a chariot of fire (Elijah), rise to the stars in a carriage drawn by six dragons (Huang Ti, the founder of the Chinese empire), or gain knowledge and afterlife in passing through the digestive tract of a feathered serpent (Maya kings). In

Cuanto más materialmente inexplicables resultan la propia devoción y compromiso por una causa sagrada -es decir, cuanto más absurdas son-, mayor es la fe que otros depositan en ella y más compromiso genera esta fe por parte de ellos.

All religions have core beliefs that confound these innate expectations about the world, such as faith in physically powerful but essentially bodiless deities. These beliefs grab attention, activate intuition, and mobilize inference in ways that facilitate their social transmission, cultural selection, and historical persistence. New experiments suggest that such beliefs, in small doses, are optimal for memory. This greatly favors their cultural survival. Mature

Because religious beliefs and experiences cannot be reliably validated through logical deduction or observational induction, validation occurs only by satisfying the emotions that motivate religion in the first place. Religious