To act in concert with, or at least not in conflict with, others, we require a narrative (scope) and a means of decidability (choice). Religion provides both.

Philosophy (reason), Scientism (evidence), Politics(utility), and Magianism(mythology) all are forms of religion: means by which we compose useful narratives and construct useful rules of decidability so that we can succeed in cooperating with others in a densely populated world where we share a division of perceptive and cognitive labor.

Progressivism (Democratic Socialist Secular Humanism) is just as much a religion predicated upon falsehoods as is supernatural scriptural monotheism. We are unequal. Diversity is bad. Redistribution to the point where it affects reproduction is bad.

To some degree scientism is just as much a religion as any of them when paired with correlative mathematics (statistics).

I am not quite sure that mathematical modeling of the physical universe doesn’t equally qualify as a form of Buddhism (any set of axiomatic rules in which everything is possible and therefore the rules cannot be possibly true).

Western conservatism (aristocratic egalitarianism) is certainly a religion, even if its content was accumulated empirically over thousands of years. At present it is a mythology.

I hope someday to debate the standing atheists – not in defense of religion, and not against atheism, but that they are not atheists, but statists, innumerate and pseudo-scientific.