Why has religion seemingly always existed in human society? I'm actually shocked at looking at the number of atheists worldwide, it's generally pretty small. That's weird to me because it seems like non-theism would be vanilla and theism would be flavored, but looking back at human history it seems that theism of some type has been vanilla all along. Why is that? Was theism a natural out-growth of the evolutionary process of the modern human mind? Did it serve some critical purpose to the cohession of society that the society would not have survived otherwise? Was it the group think of filling in the blanks on the collectivr tabula rasa? Thoughts?