Faith And Commitment

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.

-- Scott Atran (1952 -), American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, and Research Professor at the University of Michigan, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (2002), Introduction: an evolutionary riddle, p. 5