There's no doubt about that. Humans have a very strong religious bent that is bred into us by evolution selecting for motivated, tenacious people who fight to survive but whose brains can't stop patterning-matching, perceiving threats and agency behind things, and performing rituals. Not to mention, organizing around common beliefs. Without various sky-friend myths, we organize around other myths. Thankfully we have good science now, but that's unfortunately often less sexy (and more difficult) than pseudo-science and fads.
Isn't this exactly what the French Revolution's first wave, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists all did? Or are you suggesting something more explicitly Hegelian like the religion of "The sign of the T" from Brave New World (though that religion was focused on production not transformation)?
~ C. S. Lewis
That's much too simplistic and isn't going to convince anyone of the point you're trying to make.
> his has been replaced by ersatz religions, but I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress
We've done this multiple times before and always with disastrous or at least dissipative results. The technical term for this is "cult" and more specifically "idolatry". There are very good reasons why this has generally been proscribed by monotheistic religions.
> civilization is a cybernetic organism that encompasses all of us
Saying civilization is cybernetic in that it consists of feedback loops that keep it in a stable condition is stretching it. Perhaps a nation could be cybernetic since it contains a variety of channels through which this information can flow in both directions but a civilization as a supranational system has some very tight bottlenecks that would impede such functioning.
> gives us all sorts of neat things
It does not. People do that and the things are not so much given as they are bargained for whether with money or by signing on to a social contract or adopting cultural values.
This has been replaced by ersatz religions, but I think we should start explicitly worshipping the concept of civilization and progress. From a certain point of view, civilization is a cybernetic organism that encompasses all of us and gives us all sorts of neat things.