Belief?

[Edwardo Piet]

Exactly. It's just that the trait doesn't have to be useful. It just has to be not harmful enough to skew the balance.

If the net balance between use and harm of whatever constellation of traits causes religious behaviour is good enough, it'll stick, even if the religious behaviour it causes CAN cause problems.

If evolution lacks one thing, that's foresight. Religious behaviour may have even been of some kind of use at the point it came to be, but that doesn't mean it still is. Going by memetics even, it just needs to survive in a host long enough to infect another to ensure its survival.

I guess it's hard to use less words to describe it other than 'Evolutional Merit' or 'Evolutionary Useful' but I just mean a quality that won't die out as opposed to a quality that will die out....I guess a quality that survives is more 'useful' to the survival of the genes and/or memes than a quality that doesn't survive....

What I mean is Religion doesn't need to be 'useful' (notice the quote marks) but the cause of Religon - faith - does have to be 'useful' in the sense it has to survive by its own merit.