Perspectives on religion

Religion as...

• Strategy for tribal flourishing, i.e., survival and reproduction.
• Religion as community-enforced mating and parenting strategy (see e.g. Kenrick). "Parenting writ large."
• Religion as community-enforced parasite-defense strategy, i.e., behavioral or social immune system.
• Vessel for transmitting spiritual experiences.
• Replicating meme-plex, i.e., a mind virus. Designed to colonize children very easily. See e.g. Terrence Deacon's theory of language.
• Ritualization of important but ill-understood ideas. Mostly-useful rituals and practices along with confabulated reasons for them.
• Vessel for storing low-frequency information. (Medium-frequency information stored as values. High-frequency information stored as beliefs.) Cargo-cult of our ancestors. C.f. godshatter, the remnants of a transcendent being in the mind of a lower form; a superintelligence ramming data and thought patterns into a human brain.
• Religion as tribal-cohesion instincts (hive switch; signaling swarm) congealing around... death rites? death and sex? dead, sex, and hygiene? ("Politics" is what happens when our tribal-cohesion instincts congeal around war?)