Religious thought defaults while disbelief requires deliberate cognitive effort

Evidence

Some form of religious thinking seems to be the path of least resistance for our cognitive systems. By contrast, disbelief is generally the result of deliberate, effortful work against our natural cognitive dispositions—hardly the easiest ideology to propagate. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 575

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds for the reader’s pair with Norenzayan’s Big God mechanism and Baumard’s partner choice: if disbelief is effortful, then authorities forcing public apostasy may gain by making continued religious commitment costly — trampling the fumi-e harnesses this asymmetry. — connects to: Religion as quest values open-ended doubting over settled answers
• QUESTION: Tension worth resolving: if theism is the intuitive default, does public apostasy stamp out belief, or only strip the visible partner-choice signal while private faith endures? Relevant to Rodrigues’s inner survival after apostasy.
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone working on secularization or cognitive science of religion given the crisp Boyer one-liner about disbelief being effortful work.