I think you’ll find that for the most part beliefs that are present across religions are pro-adaptive in the economic and technological contexts in which they arise. I also think people fail to appreciate how much their own worldview reflects the religious tradition of their community. Coming from an eastern tradition, western secular humanism seems like an “ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of” Christianity.

Thinking about the fertility crisis facing most of the world has made me rethink the foundations of a 'good' society. People who have more education, income, intelligence, and secularity are simply not reproducing in anywhere even remotely near sustainable levels. So what's going to happen? These traits will naturally be removed from society, up until the point that this trend reverses.

So we will essentially be defacto empowering many of the views that you may consider undesirable. It really makes one rethink the relevance and place of sustainability. It seems that on any timescale that matters, it must be considered the most fundamentally critical value of any culture. Because in some ways society really is a sort of expanding zero-sum game. When one group declines, another group defacto rises.

It's really annoying that there seems to be little to nothing in the way of a compromise between indulgent excesses driving the death of procreation on one end, and 'trust nothing but the Book' driving successful procreation on the other. There needs be some sort of a cultural medium.

I am personally atheist/apathetic. The closest thing you could get me to profess a religious fervour to is exercise (or martial arts) and mother nature. That said, I am a huge proponent of religion and can see how it is so important to people like my mother.

She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as someone who has clawed her way through a poverty most people in this world will only ever read about, she has known what difficulty can be. Faith keeps her positive and kind and generous. She finds it in herself to let go of anger and to forgive thanks to her belief in God.

So you're bang on the mark - my personal observations agree that religion helps us process emotions.

Seen through the lens of a social technology, we've replaced religion with consumerism and individualism, and social media has encouraged unchecked mammon. And so we're having to relearn everything old as new again.

Confession and grace are parts of the toolkit in therapy. Breathing techniques from yoga, wim hof and meditation are doing the rounds. The presence of song and chanting in many religions seems like a decent overlap...

Then at times of the highest reported rates of loneliness, especially amongst the young, what did religion give us - a local community.

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...