“Religious beliefs are counterfactual insofar as they are anomalous (e. g., God is gendered but sexless; Saturn devours his own children; lambs lie with lions), implausible (e. g., Athena bursts forth from Zeus's head; the Zai:rean Nkundo hero Lianja springs fully armed from the leg of his mother; Lao-Tse either emerges with his white beard from the left side of his mother, who bore him for eighty years, or is born immaculately of a shooting star), and, most significantly, counterintuitive (e. g., the Judea-Christian God is a sentient and emotional being with no body; Greek, Hindu, Maya, and Egyptian deities are half-human half-beast; the Chinese monkey god can travel thousands of kilometers at one somersault).”

— Scott Atran

Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 4
In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002)

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Scott Atran 18

Anthropologist 1952

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