“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

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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