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Religious practice is costly in terms of material sacrifice (at least one's prayer time), emotional expenditure (inciting fears and hopes), and cognitive effort (maintaining both factual and counterintuitive networks of beliefs).

— Scott Atran In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

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Faith

More quotes by Scott Atran

Religions are not adaptations and they have no evolutionary functions as such.

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Religion survives science and secular ideology not because it is prior to or more primitive than science or secular reasoning, but because of what it affectively and collectively secures for people.

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

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.

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

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.

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

Human cognition (re)creates the gods who sustain hope beyond sufficient reason and commitment beyond self interest. Humans ideally represent themselves to one another in gods they trust. Through their gods, people see what is good in others and what is evil.

In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

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Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

William James The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Peter Carr (1787)

I had never doubted my own abilities, but I was quite prepared to believe that "the world" would decline to recognize them.

Colin Wilson Postscript to the Outsider (1967)

Love is the active, working principle in all true faith. It is its very soul, without which it is dead. "Faith works by love."

Jonathan Edwards Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Scott Atran (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.