Is Religion an Attempt to Understand the World?

[mordant]

To address the OP, I believe religion, and any other institution, is a collective attempt to reinforce a tribalism mentality to restrict our world view into something understandable and manageable for coping with life. That is essentially how we are build. The very act of "growing up" is putting restrictions on the unfettered imagination and chaos of childhood into something functional and manageable for one's self. Much in the same way we form intentional social structures (like religion or politics) to restrict things like freedom, critical thinking  and inclusiveness so we can operate at an improved level of safeness or sameness in our day-to-day.

Another way to look at it is that we look for rules of thumb, shared conventions and other philosophical and semantic shortcuts to simplify our mental model of reality that we work from.

There is nothing wrong with this so long as we are aware we are doing it and review for blind spots on a regular basis. I think the problem comes in where people come up with an abstraction, say "job done" and move on and never look at it critically ever again -- to the point where subsequent generations aren't even aware of the implicit assumptions they operate on, or why.

A great story on this score is a guy whose wife would always trim the corners off a beef roast before putting it in the pan. He was curious why this was. His wife simply said, well, my mother taught me to do it that way. So he asked the mother, and got the same answer. He eventually worked his way to the grandmother who said, oh, the pan I had when I married your grandfather was too small for the roast to fit into.

I think we have a lot of mental and procedural tics like this that either no longer serve a purpose or are downright dysfunctional. If we keep doing things The Way They've Always Been Done or The Way Everyone Knows They Should Be Done (or, The Way the Bible Commands It) then we run into escalating problems. That doesn't mean simplifications are bad, just that mindless simplification is potentially bad. In fact I would say, mindless simplification is "always eventually bad, to some degree".