On the other hand it produced a lot of related technology. Calendars, mathematics, writing, agricultural practices, government and economic systems. Most of this stuff emerged as an effort to document and proliferate spiritual ideas.

I see your point, but I'd say religion's main technological purpose is as a storage system for the encoding of other technologies (and social patterns) into rituals, the reasons for which don't need to be understood; to the point that it actively discourages examination of their reasons, as what we could call an error-checking protocol. So a religion tends to freeze those technologies in the time at the point of inception, and to treat any reexamining of them as heresy. Calendars are useful for iron age farming, but you can't get past a certain point as a civilization if you're unwilling to reconsider your position that the sun and stars revolve around the earth, for example.