[imtringued]

A lot of people don't see religion as a self replicating cultural program that benefits its biological host. It provides answers for the unanswerable. It is like L_2 norm based regularization in machine learning. You need an answer and there are many solutions, so you have to have a criteria for picking one.

Turns out in the last few centuries a lot of unanswerable questions have found answers rooted in scientific progress and the new answers conflict with the previous answers, which by their very function as placeholders could not have been correct.

[krackers]

Only HN would compare religion to L2 regularization! That said, your perspective "self replicating cultural program that benefits its biological host" is one that I think I've seen expressed before by the philosopher/cogscientist Josha Bach, and it seemed to fit well. It's not just a cultural program, it's effectively is a "mind virus/symbiont" (depending on who you ask), in that it also modifies behavior and psychology.