What does religion have to do with Human Advancement??

In class today, I was assigned epoch one and was asked to come up with the 3 BIGGEST questions that appeared or that the civilizations living during this epoch were faced with. My groups discussed many different subjects but stayed mostly around the ideas of government, the need for law, and the difference between church and state. Then we finally came up with three that we all agreed on, until a statement came to my head... "In order to advance and move forward, one must first look back." What it basically means to me, is that religion was created by us so that it could fill-in the gaps we then had in history.

So in order to advance one must first look back or know what they're coming from to know in which direction to go and strategies to use. In the first epoch, such thing did not exist because as you might know, 'The First Epoch got the Ball Rolling.' But with the creation of religion, people then had a way to deal with things. They'd turn to the biblical scripts of their religion, which in turn became guidelines on things to follow and things to avoid when faced with certain decisions. They used religion, as we now use history, as something to refer to when making tough decisions because back then, to them, and to some of us still, religion is history. It’s the history of mankind and god or gods. Religion told a story its version of how we came to be. Although nowadays religious passages teach morals instead of history, it played a big part in what we say is history now.