Quotes from Pascal Boyer

What we mean when we say that something is cultural is that it is roughly similar to what we find in other members of the particular group we are considering, and unlike what we would find in members of a contrast group. This is why it is confusing to say that people share a culture, as if culture were common property. We may have strictly identical amounts of money in our respective wallets without sharing any of it!

If religion allays anxiety, it cures only a small part of the disease it creates.

Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions.

There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.

Societies have religion because social cohesion requires something like religion. Social groups would fall apart if ritual did not periodically reestablish that all members are part of a greater whole.

Humans never invented anything that goes as deep as scientific investigation into understanding why the world is the way it is, nor have we found any other way of seeking knowledge that gets it so consistently right. Doing science is also difficult and frustrating, and in many ways goes against the grain of our spontaneous ways of thinking.

I do not think that people have religion because they relax their usually strict criteria for evidence and accept extraordinary claims; I think they are led to relax these criteria because some extraordinary claims have become quite plausible to them.

If people feel a conflict between their inclinations and a norm that is followed by everybody else, it is a conflict within their heads.

People may have finely tuned coalitional capacities, but they do not necessarily have access to how these work. The cues that make some people appear reliable and others less so are computed in ways that often escape conscious attention.

coalitional dynamics would predict that whatever outsiders do is often little concern to fundamentalists. What matters is what other members of the group are likely to do.

To sum up, then, fundamentalism is neither religion in excess nor politics in disguise. It is an attempt to preserve a particular kind of hierarchy based on coalition, when this is threatened by the perception of cheap and therefore likely defection.

Religion is not just about flying mountains, talking trees and biological monsters but also about agents whose mental states matter a lot, about connections with predation and death, about links with morality and misfortune.

the fact that early humans did decorate corpses, lay out the bodies in particular postures or bury people with flowers, aligned horns or tools would support the notion that some ritualization of death is a very ancient human activity.

That we have evolved capacities for social interaction means that we tend to represent morality and misfortune in a very special way, which makes the connection with supernatural agents extremely easy and apparently obvious.

A common explanation is that we imagine person-like agents who rule our destinies because this produces a reassuring view of our existence and the world around us. We project human features onto nonhuman aspects of our world because that makes these aspects more familiar and therefore less frightening.

Having a normal human brain does not imply that you have religion. All it implies is that you can acquire it, which is very different.

Most accounts of the origins of religion emphasize one of the following suggestions: human minds demand explanations, human hearts seek comfort, human society requires order, human intellect is illusionprone.

Consider morality. In some places people say that the gods laid down the rules people live by. In other places the gods or ancestors simply watch people and sanction their misdemeanours. In both cases people make a connection between moral understandings (intuitions, feelings and reasoning about what is ethical and what is not) and supernatural agents (gods, ancestors, spirits).

Our inference systems may be there because they provide solutions to problems that were recurrent in normal human environments for hundred of thousands of years.

The journalistic cliché that this is the -information age- is misleading if it suggests that in the past, either recent or distant, we did not depend on information.

Social exchange is certainly among the oldest of human behaviors, as humans have depended on sharing and exchanging resources for a very long time.

So there was a clear economic rationale for an ancestral division of labor, where individuals of each sex contributed more of what was comparatively advantageous to them. Women of course (and sometimes do) hunt, but men are on average more productive hunters; men can (and often do) gather and process foods, but they are not any more productive than women at the task.

The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination.

Ethnic violence is not an uncontrolled outburst of rage. The fact that it takes such predictable forms means that some common processes are shaping these violent interactions, and that participants have psychological capacities and preferences that make it possible for them to engage in these acts in a coordinated manner.