Religions survive because they provide a group strategy for large populations, a

Religions survive because they provide a group strategy for large populations, a standard of weights and measures for behavior avoiding conflict, and the mindfulness that results as populations and anonymity and therefore risk scale.
We have developed ‘work’ since the agrarian age. We developed scale after the bronze age collapse. We developed coinage that allowed abstract economic relationships. We developed religion to homogenize people who cooperate and trade by expanding these non-kin networks. We developed rules (early laws) to enforce those rules. We developed law (laws proper) to resolve conflicts between increasingly abstract relationships with people across increasingly different abilities and interests. We developed political systems, early accounting, then writing, to continue to organize these abstract relationships with promises and measurements and punishments for violation.
And while the evolution of these technologies provided us with a division of labor, wealth sufficient for experts and innovators and transport and trade, and a rapid increase in available institutions, machines, tools, goods, services, and information and a decline in the cost of all of them, the result is alienation.
When political religion failed to reform in response to the industrial revolution we found political ideology to replace it.
Which did not unify us as did religion.
It divided us.
There is only one non false religion that unifies: the respect of the natural law of cooperation, the worship (thanks for the debt of) our ancestors, our heroes, our people, and nature. For those are the only non-false debts we bear in common, and the only non-false debts that bind us to one another in a willingess for support, care, and yes, redistribution.
Let a thousand nations bloom.

Curt Doolittle
The Natural Law Institute