To the contrary. I sped through my compsci capstone coursework first year of college and spent most of the rest of my time in philosophy, psychology, and sociology classrooms. The "hey if you squint this thing it looks like religion for the non-religious" perspective is just one I've heard countless times. It is perfectly valid to have a fact based discussion on whether there is a biological desire for religiosity, but drawing a long line from that to broadly critique someone's well-articulated ideas is pretty sloppy.

Quoting your college classes is the first sign of inexperience but I’ll Share some modern concepts.

In Adam Curtis‘s all watched over by machines of loving Grace, he makes a pretty long and complete argument that humanity has a rich history of turning over its decision-making to inanimate objects in a desire to discover ideologies we can’t form ourselves in growing complexity of our interconnectivity.

He tells a history of them constantly failing because the core ideology of “cybernetics” is underlying them all and fails to be adaptive enough to match our DNA/Body/mind combined cognitive system. Especially when scaled to large groups.

He makes the second point that humanity and many thinkers constantly also resort to the false notion of “naturalism” as the ideal state of humanity, when in reality there is no natural state of anything, except maybe complexity and chaos.

Giving yourself up to something. Specially something that doesn’t work is very much “believing in a false god.”