In the modern world, probably. In those early days of humanity attempting to descipher the world, it was just grasping at some kind of control. Destructive forces beyond our control governed our lives. The human brain is designed to pick out patterns, and where there are none it tends to create them. Praying to the god of rain to end the drought, in the religious mind, grants one some semblance of control over one's life. First world countries grant autonomy as a right, and when you already want for nothing, religion becomes sort of muddled. It was clearly an attempt to explain the natural world, and got convoluted over the millenia like a game of telephone. It was an attempt at survival, and became something else.