Religion spares us from existential angst, research shows. Humans want it.

[Freelancer]

11. Religion is the result of natural selection, or presursor to natural selection...

Either those who had religion, for whatever reason, survived, and passed on the positive trait, or the entire human race fell victim to a virulent neural cognitive construct, languished as hosts to it for ages, and only now are producing some offspring with a modicum of resistance to it.

If something akin to the latter is true, it seems, quite likely that there ARE individuals who would have a genuine need to remain hosts. What comes to mind are the findings in recent years that some auto immune diseases are the result of our ancestors systems being flooded with immune suppressant secretions of parasites, and the slowness of our counter adaptation in cleaner times. Our bodies attack themselves today because the parasites our ancestors carried are no longer in us. Something similar could be going on in the minds of many people that cling to theism so hard.

The question that people who throw off religion need to ask may be whether, in fact, they've thrown off an infection, or simply become hosts to a newly mutated form that is content to operate in the background of cognition -- sans idols.

Did we really step out of the matrix, or are we still in it?