Religion

Religions are unconscious philosophies.

Yes!

Thats a long awaited definition.

*clinking grails*

This is why symbols are instrumental, as are melodies and scents, and all sensual things - why Catholicism is a religion but Protestantism is not -
unless the dank fumes of guilt and remorse that one find in the churches counts as the breath of god - ah, rhetoric. Forget both.

The larger point takes us back to animal sacrifice, or human sacrifice - but let's stick with animals as an example, the spirit as it was seen to emit from the freshly spilled blood - this sensuous thirst for experience of 'something more' - which is prevalent throughout the excess that is the perceptible world and works through the subconscious physiology of taste and behavior that forms a 'tribe under god'.

- What is a religious man?
- One who bows before a judgment he has made before he became aware of it.

Well, as a self-proclaimed Atheist I would not be able to disagree with that and still remain honest.

But all cultures have some sort of creation myth and they always need a supernatural power for its creation. Therefore the need for a God and the beginning of their religion.

It really only means 'the unthought source' - mixed with a degree of reverence for that source.
and to be fair, until recently, there wasnt any logical idea that could do any better.
There was no logic of the subconscious, basically until Nietzsche showed how that is not fundamentally different from the conscious logics - all are will to power and nothing besides.
To me this means self-valuing and ultimately a lot besides. But all of that besides is just experience, no law or principle, just fleeting being that can take on any form until/unless it disintegrates.

what survives is only efficiency in reproduction, be it of gene or method or story. 99% of willing to power goes right past and beyond that purpose, into the world of play, fantasms and genius.

This results in joy, which itself is actually the thing that is being reproduced - but not by means as palpable or comprehensible as the previously mentioned. The propagation of joy is what religion is all about. Yes, it completely and utterly fails in the majority of cases. And yet it's what it's about. Its failure is so deep because it is oriented entirely on that purpose, that function - joy for its own sake. Thence we also got pain for its own sake.

Yeah, it's fucked. Religion only makes sense as a celebration of the seasons.

I really don't want to sound anti-religion. I am anti-religious establishment.

There are many people who need more in their life than their physical reality. Religion satisfies many of these needs.

And my biggest complain against established religion is how it controls the life of people for the religion's benefit.

An interesting thing about religion is how it combines the most abstract with the most concrete; for example, Christians say that God loves you, and this statement basically takes the most abstract thing possible, "God", and attaches to it a very concrete thing, love. So a person who hears this message, "God loves you", is sort of shocked psychologically and becomes a deer in the headlights, because they cannot really process the signal coming to them that contains the most abstract/unknowable thing possible for them to even conceive in the most general way possible, "god", identical and side-by-side with something so tangible, concrete, specific and knowable, namely the experience of love.

By combining these most general and most specific together in a single concept, the mind is sort of paralyzed. A void-space opens up for a moment, and the content of the concept flows into that space, into oneself; thus people feel a sudden emotional uplift, catharsis, and can even start crying out of sheer joy from being told the simple three words, "God loves you". The entire meaning of "love" is stripped of specific context and invades the general, symbolic abstract space, i.e. the mind. Conversely, a person could also say "God hates you" and if this was actually taken seriously by the person to whom it was told, then terror and despair would fill that person's mind.

So the religious concept "God loves you" is a kind of mental self-value construct that we reach into when we feel a need for that experience of love itself, that catharsis, extra meaning, context, etc. This is closely related to what prayer is, of course.

Using our ideas to self-stimulate and alter our self-valuings, in ways that produce additional meaning for ourselves. To infuse greater experience of love into oneself would have an affect on one's self-valuing, for example. It would lead to the elevation of priority of certain values and the lowering of priority of other values, based on the degree and kind of relationship those values hold to whatever "love" means to us in that moment.

The space of possibly such 'religious concepts' that could be created is theoretically endless. We could come up with new such concepts. And if we understand what we are doing, we can make them in such a way that the end up affecting valuing-hierarchies in ways that promote the kinds of valuings we want and lower the kinds of valuings we do not want.