my two cents:

Perhaps there’s a bit of ‘dancing on the head of a pin’ going on here?

Might not mankind’s near universal persistence of religious belief have, as explanation, a simple answer: the soul’s spiritual yearning for reconnection and oneness with God?

You know, Genesis does speak of it.

If we, in fact are God’s ‘lost’ children, how could we not mightily yearn for reunion with “a love that surpasses all understanding”?

Religion offers two things to any society that are of inestimable value: premises that transcend personal opinion and the societal cohesion that results from premises we can all agree upon.

Without social cohesion there is no possibility of maintaining civilization and eventually we are all reduced to the survival of the fittest.

Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted” concisely illustrates the consequential loss of social cohesion that inevitably develops in any society that abandons transcendent premises.

Most importantly, the veracity of any religion’s transcendent premises is irrelevant to the larger allegiance they allow to believers; that mankind’s limited understanding and the mere personal opinion and popular public whim of the moment that results, are overridden by the assertion that religion’s premises are based upon transcendent truths that allow a deeper understanding of that reality which, composes our very existence.

America has come the closest to secular transcendent ‘truths’ with its proclamation of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” but these are claimed to be inalienable rights because of the premise that they are granted by our creator and thus transcend human opinion as to their validity. It is asserted that they are divinely granted rights and, thus inalienable rights that cannot be taken away.

There’s just no getting away from the need for and necessity of, a set of ‘organizational moral principles’ that individuals can embrace in order to form a society and, since one individual’s premises are as logically valid as anothers, only transcendent premises have the organizational power to bind men together.