The Religious Void

[Belacqua]

So if we're wired to behave religiously, is it better to do so within a religious institution than outside of one?

[...] We're have predispositions toward superstition and tribalism that mix with various social institutions to produce religion. [...]

I suspect that the OP is thinking of this pre-wired disposition differently than some other people here. 

It might be clearer if we don't think of the details of any particular religion, but of the overall structure. This is what, I think, people are wired for.

So if we take out the details of a given religion -- Christianity or Buddhism, etc. -- then we can define a religion as a mental and emotional structure which integrates metaphysical beliefs, values, and desires in a way that makes sense of the world for its adherents. And I think that any thinking adult has such a structure, whether or not it includes ideas of God or other traditionally religious concepts. 

Sometimes you read philosophically naive atheists who seem to think that religion is just a kind of blanket of error, thrown over people's view of the world. They think that if this blanket could be pulled away, we'd be left with a direct and unproblematic view of things, and any errors that might remain would be, eventually, cleared away by science. 

I don't think that philosophy, sociology, or anthropology can support such a simple view. Everyone has a structure of beliefs through which he interprets the world. Everyone holds to a set of metaphysical beliefs. Everyone has an ideology. Anyone who says he doesn't have these things is just revealing that he hasn't examined his own structure yet. We all get our ways of interpreting the world through unprovable and historically contingent commitments. For example, the idea that science tells us accurately about the world (rather than just a mental image of the world) is itself a metaphysical view that can't be proven by science. The whole set of liberal values which most Americans hold to is very much a historically contingent and probably unsustainable ideology. 

(And here I don't mean "liberal" in the way that the American media uses it -- the opposite of "conservative" -- but in the classical sense of "liberal values." That is, the assumption of liberty, the sovereignty of the individual, that stuff.) 

So the web of beliefs and values that a modern American atheist has wouldn't normally be called a religion, but it is structured much like one. It differs from that of a modern American Christian in that it doesn't have a God, but it does have all kinds of unprovable and historically contingent assumptions. And -- perhaps unfortunately -- a surprisingly large percentage of that structure would probably be shared between the two groups. 

So I am sympathetic to the OP's argument, because I think that many modern atheists are unaware that they have such a structure, and haven't examined what it consists of. Again, they think that because they lack religion they also lack some predetermined belief system. But I don't think that human beings in society are able to lack such a thing. (And the reason that Nietzsche said "God is dead" isn't because some deity had supposedly died, but because in his view ANY such human structure is a mentally-created dream image, and a lie.)

And being aware of one's own structure is necessary for understanding oneself and one's time. It also teaches the extent to which there are alternatives to the beliefs which to us seem self-evident, but which, if there are still people 1000 years from now, will probably seem laughably naive.