Religions are worldviews based on the authority of a supernatural entity (God or gods). They are the default worldview for most people in all societies throughout human history.
There are some 4,300 religions of the world.
The world’s 20 largest religions and their number of believers are:
- Christianity (2.1 billion)
- Islam (1.3 billion)
- Nonreligious (Secular/Agnostic/Atheist) (1.1 billion)
- Hinduism (900 million)
- Chinese traditional religion (394 million)
- Buddhism 376 million
- Primal-indigenous (300 million)
- African traditional and Diasporic (100 million)
- Sikhism (23 million)
- Juche (19 million)
- Spiritism (15 million)
- Judaism (14 million)
- Bahai (7 million)
- Jainism (4.2 million)
- Shinto (4 million)
- Cao Dai (4 million)
- Zoroastrianism (2.6 million)
- Tenrikyo (2 million)
- Neo-Paganism (1 million)
- Unitarian-Universalism (800,000)
https://www.theregister.com/2006/10/06/the_odd_body_religion
From a secular prospective, religions are an honest mistake.
They are an ancient tribes rules and collective memories rolled up into an all inclusive world view. It’s passed down from generation to generation until fiction and mythology become fact. Once it becomes the sacred word of god, then we call it a religion.
And that’s why it seems so real from the inside. It’s a complete system with all the answers because it has been tailored to fit the tribe by countless minds over many generations.
Religions propagate when learned in a child’s mind in the absence of conflicting information. That’s why it’s so important to indoctrinate a child into a religion early in life, before they can learn about the real world.
Indoctrinate them early and sufficiently and they will reject all non religious facts as the work of the devil and pass that belief system on to the next generation.
Religions are a mistake made by primative man, based on the limited information available at the time. But they continue to survive and even thrive in spite of the evidence against them, because they so effectively satisfy to man’s innate spiritual needs.