well, i think there are more commonalities than that but since my argument was that commonalities aren't really needed, to me this point is not really important.

speaking of commonalities, this subthread has diverged from the original topic quite a lot and in an odd way is actually converging with the discussion on "Life is not a story" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41876979

regarding animals, i don't get which point you are making there.

Thanks for the link to the other thread, I skipped that article the other day. (Barely keep up with my threads on weekends.)

Point on animals is that it isn't just the story telling that propagates religion and similar, but persistent story telling. Writing things down and learning the symbols of previous generations is a fairly uniquely human activity.

thanks, now i get your point. essentially what we are discussing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_origin_of_religio... a topic that i am not deeply familiar with, and to be fair, i also don't hold a strong opinion on. in my naive view i believe the following to make sense: storytelling precedes religion. religion evolved from storytelling and became more elaborate, motivating the development of the role of priests because the skills and knowledge needed took more time than a normal person had available and the role was deemed important enough to warrant significant time investment into learning it by selected individuals as part of the specialization of roles in a community. today priests are no longer needed because the skills needed to create, share and interpret stories can be learned by anyone.

to summarize the argument and bring it back to the main topic, i'd like to argue that adversity influenced storytelling which created religion and religion necessitated priests. so yes, without priests religions may not have persisted, but that's like saying without farmers farming would not have taken hold and we would still all be hunter/gatherers.