I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote:

> Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles, is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

I'd never read this passage but I've often had a similar thought, that maybe the benefit religion provides people is as a placeholder that saves you from subordinating your life to the wrong things. When devout people say "I really had to pray on it" about a big decision, it means at least that they spent some time asking about their real priorities and their duties, that kind of thing. If "nothing is more important than God", maybe that helps prevent people from making any one thing too important in their life— something that likely benefits them whether their god exists or not.

I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.

Islam established this over 1400 years ago in the Quran. For example:

* https://quran.com/al-furqan/43

* https://quran.com/al-jathiyah/23