In other words religion is just an internal monologue cranking and failing to turn over.

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger, but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

On the Abraham/Isaac thing, there’s a reason why in religion, generally speaking, parents are pretty much allowed to do anything to their kids (or not strictly forbidden), while kids are required to respect their parents (regardless of what they do to them/how they raise them, “spare the rod spoil the child” and all that). This is how you perpetuate a religion - “You are part of this religion, don’t ask any problematic questions about it, respect ma authoritah!”

(I think it’s also related to Aristotle’s “Give me a child until he’s 7, and I will show you the man”, in the meaning of “indoctrinate them while you can”)