The purpose of religion is to replicate culture, which is made of memeplexes, which are made of memes, like your DNA has chromosomes made of individual genes.

Culture is your operating system. The narrative of the framework from which you derive your identity determines what you experience and how you think n behave. Our two main ways of learning from this world as children are play and story. Of these, story is the first cognitive technology, as it allows us to consciously structuralize the narratives from which we derive our identity.

This means culture can be engineered around the effect that specific language would have on certain archetypes of individuals that prior to monotheism, manifested in the form of pantheons and families of gods n goddesses. In the process of wrapping everyone around a core narrative, this resulted in synchronization of society.

Hence, why we have the ethos/pathos complex of Donald Trump. No, seriously, in the modern day, we have functionally weaponized religion by engineering two diametrically opposed cults of divergent political narrative. Likewise, we did this around things like the American Revolution and Jesus, but what my random word generator told me to write all this for is to talk about how we built a boat on a mountain.

Because “who would build a boat on a mountain?” IS a cognitive technology. We took kids to it to prove to them that God is real because God does not speak in the storms or earthquakes or fires but a whisper; synchronicity as Carl Jung called the phenomenon, or what is a burning bush in the Bible or white rabbit to Neo.

Y’know, kid is home alone. Ooh, gunna get into the cookies! Wham! The broom fell? Well, in a godless universe, that’s just the wind, whatever, let’s pick it up and get a-cookieing! But if the child knows that they are always watched and God is all powerful, they choose to resist temptation, strengthening their prefrontal cortex and making them better able to resist temptation in the future, and more.

Also, reconciliation and Karma and the world is an illusion and everything you experience is procedurally generated based on how you have and are setting your intention, the only thing you have any direct control over. It’s just basic topology, folks!