I feel religion is fundamentally an exploitation of fear. No matter which faith you are looking at, they exploit the weakness of being the only animal on this planet that has made the evolutionary leap to what we call consciousness. Having an awareness that life begins and ends is a unique experience to our species and religion is an exploitation of that awareness. Scientifically we can identify tangible metrics that have evolved in our species' brains that are different from other animals, but we do not have all the answers on the exact mechanism and moment at which the threshold to consciousness is crossed. This also tends to be where religious myths like to come in, to explain what we don't yet truly understand with mysticism.
Our species emerged about 100,000 years ago in Africa. Imagine what it was like initially for them looking up at the moon and the sun, experiencing a thunderstorm or the wind blowing. All the capabilities of our species' minds, but none of the foundation of knowledge and science we have collectively developed to pass on in order to understand nature. It would have been terrifying, they had no fucking clue what the sun or the moon was, likely why many early examples of religions immediately went to celestial objects as being deities observing us. When a thunderstorm rolled in and lightning started coming down from the sky they would have believed it was a god taking an enraged piss on them all. The mechanism of creation is always taking place and observable in nature, so mythologies developing around its early non-observable stages among self aware species in their infancy is likely a common event.
The fear mechanism is being aware your life is going to end because you can observe life ending all around you and experiencing the loss of life of those close to you in a deeply emotional way. These myths have taken hold because facing and accepting that is difficult, so it's a way out, and there is no better sell than one that lets you cheat death. There is no reason or evidence to believe we are a special species that has a paradise awaiting them and the other animals simply die off because they are not 'chosen ones'. It's easy to think we're special because of the depth of our experience in life contrasted to other animals, but we're just another example of the evolutionary process at work and the myriad of different adapted abilities it produces. In our case it is the largest example of a primate brain and the intelligence it has provided us. There are other species that have abilities we don't, yet we don't celebrate the ability of a hawk to fly at a great heights and see small rodents on the ground or the impervious immune system of an alligator as some holy gift.
The current day Abrahamic religions are so farcical as well. Three different groups, all at odds with one another, one of them starkly at odds with the other two. Yet they all worship the same god from the same story. The original book, the torah, making fundamental claims in its first genesis chapter about creation and nature that have been irrefutably proven false. The case should be closed right there for most people, but it's a testament to how irrational our species can be when we are frightened that many still choose to believe a mythology that is patently false. If I had to go in for a religion, I wouldn't even be into the current day major faiths. The Greek stuff from about 3000 years ago is a lot cooler. Give me a Zeus on a lightning bolt any day over a goat herder from the Middle East telling us all to feel bad about ourselves.
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