“Unless you’re an actor onstage, believing one thing but behaving in a way that contradicts it makes you feel stress. To dispel that stress, you can do one of two things: change your behaviors to match your beliefs, or change your beliefs to match your behaviors. But in the case of public behaviors that you can’t easily take back, like proselytizing the end of the world due to extraterrestrials, giving up beliefs can become quite difficult. And so people find ways to protect them.”