What if religion is just an accident of human culture?
Let's start with belief.
As I wrote in an OP sometime back, belief makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view. Belief is a survival-mechanism, because it increases the speed at which children adapt to a hostile nature.
Instead of elaborately communicating to every child all the reasons why this and that should be done this and that way lest they die, belief drastically shortens the learning-timespan. "Here's the situation. Do this. No questions, just do it."
Children who are neurologically inclined to believe accept the counsel more readily and quicker than those children who question and demand lenghty explanations. => Curious people are more likely to die.
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Where does the "divine" come from?
"Divinity" is the projection of the self onto the environment. The agency and the consciousness of the person is projected in an empathic way onto the world. Just as a person assumes that other persons in his/her social environment think in similar ways to him/her, the person begins to assume the existence of further (invisible) agencies in his/her wider, natural environment.
The person sees the way he/she can intentionally shape the environment and postulates that other shapings have also been done intentionally by other persons: gods, spirits, daemons...
As a theory on the nature of the universe, this existence of divine persons, this "theory of gods", makes as much sense as other explanations. It's not that much weirder than postulating that matter is made of invisible "fields". (Well, let's leave the philosophical concept of "experiments" out of this for now.)
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I postulate that religion was created by accident, that religion was never meant to be.
You take a deep-rooted neurological preference that concerns material issues like the well-being of your offspring: The preference to accept a statement without receiving evidence for said statement.
You take an abstract concept how the universe works: The theory that all things in the universe are intentionally done by other entities, except you can't witness those entities directly, only the results of their actions.
Combine your fleshy desire to believe with the rantings of a shaman and you get religion. Religion was never a tool of understanding the universe and widening your knowledge, because belief outlaws violations of the status quo.
I postulate that religion came to be when two unrelated psychological conditions interacted.
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Yes 
I do play a little 
