Supernatural Selection Quotes

“For example, if children are told that a horse has been disguised such that it looks exactly like a zebra and trained such that it behaves exactly like a zebra, they will still claim that it is “really” a horse. This claim is based on the notion that within the horse there is some fundamental “horseness” that remains unaffected by external changes. People are thought of similarly.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“For example, if children are told that a horse has been disguised such that
it looks exactly like a zebra and trained such that it behaves exactly like a
zebra, they will still claim that it is “really” a horse. This claim is based on
the notion that within the horse there is some fundamental “horseness”
that remains unaffected by external changes. People are thought of similarly.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religion is paradoxical. It emerged out of intergroup competition, yet it has a remarkable power to unite. It sets people apart from one another, yet can also draw vastly different people together. Long ago we envisioned relationship with spiritual beings. In one sense these relationships were very mundane -they served practical human needs. The practical side of these relationships is also the source of their power to divide us, to pit one group against another. The divine side is in their capacity to quietly but persistently call us to transcend ourselves and find common ground for trust.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Humans are designed not with a specific adaptive religious module, but instead with a mind prepared to engage in the myriad social/emotional/cognitive activities that fall under what we call -religion-.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religion is complicated- the emphasis here being on the verb -is-. Religion as we see it today is the product of many millennia of evolutionary history. Neither the Olympian pantheon nor the Roman magisterium was part of religion in our ancestral world. To understand religion as a cultural adaptation, we must understand what it was when it first emerged, and what kind of world it was born into.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“If religion represents a supernaturalizing of social life, then we would expect that the gods we envision would reflect the social worlds we inhabit.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“...religion is not philosophy. Philosophy is largely confined to ivory-tower seminar rooms, but religion can be found in nearly every living room -or just about anywhere else you might care to look. Religion is not just (or even primarily) an intellectual pursuit; it is emotional.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The wealth of social rituals present among our primate cousins indicates that our hominin ancestors were preadapted for using ritual as a means of social bonding and could call upon a rich repertoire of them in their everyday lives.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religious ritual was essential to establishing and maintaining never-before-seen levels of social complexity. Furthermore, ritual behavior was the very mechanism by which we acquired our uniquely human capacity for symbolic thought. Thus, religious ritual made us human.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“People often find religion after grave personal suffering or tragedy. It was no different with our ancestors. The few humans who managed to survive this disaster did so by finding unprecedented ways to expand social cooperation.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The -natural- world included the -supernatural-, and religion (as we call it today) was simply the means by which that part of the social world was made accessible.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religion is many things, but the relational element is at its core. Nonrelational religion, if it is religion at all, is hollow.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Those whose human (especially parental) relationships have been unsatisfactory are significantly more likely to undergo a religious conversion, suggesting the need for supernatural compensation for inadequate human attachments.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Religion is a way of relating where supernatural agents are active players.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Episodic memory is our (possibly unique) ability to mentally travel back in time when recalling past personal events of project forward in time to envision future scenarios. It is this system that very likely provides the basis for our existential anxieties -our concern over the inevitability of suffering and death.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Bringing nature into the human social sphere can serve as an effective mechanism for more sustainable, less destructive use of natural resources.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“As if the natural world alone was not sufficiently demoralizing, our ancestors seemed compelled to augment it with supernatural forces designed to intensify its gloom. If religion's primary purpose was comfort against the vagaries of life, we could have wished for much better than the gods and myths we inherited.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“The human desire to keep loved ones near, even in death, hardly needs an explanation or justification. Yet very little of this story can be defended as reasonable.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“...doing right in life sometimes means that reason cannot be the sole light by which your moral compass is set.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“Human life is not a science. The good life isn't a theory to be operationalized, tested, and replicated before it is deemed useful. For better or worse, life must be lived, here and now; and what is valuable about it we often must discern, on the fly, as best we can. The hard-nosed rationality so valued in scientific circles seems oddly imcompetent when facing the human complications of real life.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved

“For some scholars, the only effective response to the threat of creationism and militant fundamentalism is a more aggressive atheism. This atheism finds no virtue in peaceful coexistence with moderate religion. Instead, it seeks to stamp out all religion. This atheism itself has been harshly critiqued.”
― Matt J. Rossano, Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved