Asklemmy

This right here. If we didn't have religion, practically the first thing we'd do is begin hallucinating about one. There's a "religion"-shaped hole in every human brain, basically, even though things that we wouldn't necessarily readily recognize as religious patterns could come to fill it, wholly or partially. Our pattern recognition/reconstruction and predictive modeling systems will always generate hallucinations that, like most heuristics, are fundamentally not reality but MAY nevertheless offer sufficient utility (or the feeling of utility) that the synaptic connections they comprise will end up self-reinforcing.

The amount of vigilance it would take to continually purge these cognitive patterns would be more expensive and exhausting than most of the potential dangers of letting them exist.

But it's possible to mindfully decide to cultivate the features and aspects of what emergently congeals there such that it's more likely to be harmless, such as certain hobbies, fandoms, habits, or ritual-esque behavioral patterns.

Reflecting on our experiences against an anthropomorphized hypothetical observer to gain insights we would otherwise miss shows up even in places like computer programming - see "rubber duck debugging" - sufficiently strict religious sects would most certainly decry this activity as idolatry to a false god, even if YOU clearly do not classify a rubber ducky as a god. Because, again, the root of religiosity is group consensus of a socially shared memetic hallucination. what they perceive becomes a component of their beliefs even if it doesn't become a component of yours.

This leads me to often consider spirituality, magical thinking, ritualistic behaviors, and religiosity in general as a bridge between our animalistic impulses and instincts vs. our sapience, or whatever you might label "higher" cognitive functions that enable abstract decision differentiation.