> author claims that there are two main approaches for
> explaining why people the world over and throughout history
> have formed religious belief systems: the alienation or
> 'opiate of the masses' view or the functionalist view that
> religion provides certain goods to individuals. I complain
And why do people form *any* belief system at all? Alienation? Utility? Or perhaps because they can, i.e. have brains capable of forming such systems. The fact of the matter is that if it were not for a bunch of fanatics ready to kill anyone for now knowing what they do, religion would be nothing more than a bunch of poorly written biographies and fairly tales that freely mix fact and fiction - in a word - literature. So why do not we ask instead (1) Why do people create literature, oral or written (of which religion is but one genre)? (2) What roles do literature and its genres (including religious tales) play in society? And (3) What mental processes/disorders lead a person to a delusional insistence on one and only interpretation of certain literary genres and to authoritarian aggression against anyone challenging that interpretation?
Beyond that, questions about origins and factual contents of religion is but a semantic wild goose chase or asking questions whose premises have no meaning, and thus cannot be answered.
Another observation, what does the ability to distinguish between "animate" and "inanimate" have to do with anything? Assuming that children indeed acquire that distinction on their own, as opposed to being taught it by adults - that does not have anything to do with philosophical arguments about existence of the world outside human consciousness etc. It is quite possible that children can extrapolate that distinction from their own experience even before they can interact with adults in an interpretable way e.g. by extrapolating something that moves and something that does not, or something that is like them (i.e. moving on its own) and everything else (i.e. not moving). It proves only that people acquire the ability to distinguish between different category of objects early in their lives and possibly without adult assistance (but the latter cannot be ruled out with certainty) and NOTHING beyond that.
Wojtek