That's a problem with our categories, though. We assign static labels to pieces of a dynamic system.
All what we consider life is essentially one big ongoing chemical reaction. We are just repetitive patterns in it, and we see repetitive patterns in it, and we label these patterns. But these patterns are changing in a way imperceptible to us, until at some point we realize the thing we're looking at is different than what it was in the past.
Religion could be viewed in the same way. We see stable, slowly changing patterns in the information flow. Patterns that tend to turn noise into more copies of themselves.
It's also important to remember that when we say that some life form or piece of information is "trying to survive", we're anthropomorphizing it. The pattern doesn't have a will and isn't trying anything. The interactions between the pattern and the noise, or other patterns, tend to yield something similar to the original pattern in question.
(That's all a sophisticated way of saying that life is like Game of Life, where we identify interesting structures and give them a name - but in code, those structures don't exist in the first place. It's just a grid and a set of rules.)