Yes it generalizes well beyond religion. All you need is something that distinguishes you and your group from others, something that is relatively easy to achieve but requires a sign of commitment. It can be how you speak, what you say, what you wear, what you eat, what you say you believe, anything really.

The people I'm less attracted to connect with are religious people, I actually have to force myselft to overlook the religiosity of my mother to live in harmony with her, but it does require effort I rather not do with anybody else. So maybe that's not the whole story, or maybe it's just a modern pitfall that wasn't as important in older times.

> Religious beliefs undergo natural selection too.

All memes do - that's why their name is based on genes. What's interesting is discovering clusters of memes that are self-reinforcing and are passed down consistently, without deviating too much from the original (while still allowing changes), over a long period of time. Arguably, religions built around such clusters have an easier time getting adherents and can get resurrected tens or hundreds of years after being nominally defeated or purged. So I don't think the "actual beliefs (mostly) don't objectively matter" characterization is warranted. I think they do matter a lot from the evolutionary standpoint; not so much for any of the current adherents, but for their grandchildren and later descendants.

To what extent the memetic content carries the institution versus how much an established institution contributes to propagating the content is unclear to me. There's definitely a relationship there, a complex interplay between vested interests, provided services, and people's needs and expectations. As you said, religion is much more than just a set of "nonsense" people get talked into. This makes it hard to discern the real utility of a particular nonsense for ensuring the religion survival.

One rarely discussed peculiarity about religion is that it distorts reality for both believers and non-believers (as one can see by observing how anti-religious people discuss what religion "is", what religious people believe, etc).

Possibly relevant:

LLMs confabulate not hallucinate

https://www.beren.io/2023-03-19-LLMs-confabulate-not-halluci...

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