but religion won’t serve basically any of the functions it does now in terms of organizing people into communities and serving as social networks.
I strongly push back on this. Religious ritual and practice is a process of social creation for communities all over the globe and has been as far as we can tell. There's a good reason people tie together their sense of meaning in the world and their social networks.
Nah dude, religious rituals and the hierarchy associated with them is as far as we can tell a post-neolithic invention. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without priests telling them how God wants them to act, whether ritually or in social settings, and we could go the next hundred thousand years without them and it wouldn't be a problem.
You're crossing some lines here between worship of a deity, priesthood as a social role, and religious rituals themselves, all of which can be found very independently of each other. The existence of religious rituals does not necessarily imply priests, gods, or hierarchies.
I strongly push back on this. Religious ritual and practice is a process of social creation for communities all over the globe and has been as far as we can tell. There's a good reason people tie together their sense of meaning in the world and their social networks.
Nah dude, religious rituals and the hierarchy associated with them is as far as we can tell a post-neolithic invention. Humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without priests telling them how God wants them to act, whether ritually or in social settings, and we could go the next hundred thousand years without them and it wouldn't be a problem.
You're crossing some lines here between worship of a deity, priesthood as a social role, and religious rituals themselves, all of which can be found very independently of each other. The existence of religious rituals does not necessarily imply priests, gods, or hierarchies.
You mean back before the agricultural revolution and people started living in societies. I think ritualised religious social groups will be fine