Ara Norenzayan

“we compared a sampling of successful and unsuccessful fairy tales in the famous Brothers Grimm collection. Successful (widely known) fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, had just two or three counterintuitive violations. Unsuccessful ones (have you heard of the Donkey Lettuce?) had none, or in other cases, quite the opposite—they had far too many violations. Successful counterintuitive representations and stories were also likely to generate emotional responses, like fear, and encouraged additional inferences.25 These kinds of memory biases play an important role in religious belief.26 The extraordinary agents endemic to religions appear to possess a particularly evocative set of abilities not shared by ordinary beings. They can be invisible; they can see things from afar; they can move through physical objects. This minimal counterintuitiveness is memorable, giving these concepts an advantage in cultural transmission. These departures from common sense are systematic but not radical enough to rupture meaning completely. As Sperber has put it, these minimal counterintuitions are relevant mysteries: they are closely connected to background knowledge, but do not admit to a final interpretation.”
― Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict

“On average, states that teemed with regular churchgoers had no fewer porn subscribers than those with few churchgoers. However, what Edelman found next gives the age-old practice of sinning a new twist: porn consumption rates in religious states followed a particular ebb and flow: the rates went down on Sundays, only to go up again on other days of the week. On average, regular churchgoers consumed similar amounts of porn as others; however, they abstained more on Sundays and shifted their porn consumption to other days of the week.”
― Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict