Thanks. But I don't see how it supports your hypothesis that symbolic thinking (ST) equates religion and that it's an evolutionary mechanism for coping with ST and self-awareness. Just as a side note and slightly off topic – frog is conscious, but, for all we know, it’s not (self-)aware. That’s a huge difference. Frog also thinks, no matter how primitive the thoughts are or how they translate into frog's perception (and awareness?). Simply speaking, frog knows but does not understand one bit.

In any case, and although we had this kind of discussion several times already, I must reiterate – the fact that apes are self-aware, do engage in ST (and most probably also) ritualistic behavior, and that there are people who exhibit ritualistic and ceremonial behavior but are not religious in any meaning of the word makes your hypothesis basically moot. If this was not the case, you would see (signs of) religion among apes, but more importantly, there would be no non-religious person.

As I said many times, a way of life that contains ritualistic and ceremonial behavior is not religious per se, religion co-opts these functions — see e.g. animism vs polytheism. The former is a lifestyle build around a naive worldview and even proto-science, the latter is then merely a dogmatic social construct.

In other words, using our instinctual fear of unknown, which when combined with high abstract notion of death and thus also search for meaning et cetera could result in ritualistic and ceremonial coping behavior, as an argument in favor of religion being ingrained in our DNA, so to speak, is similar to arguments in favor of social Darwinism and dominance hierarchies that ignore millennia of egalitarian civilizations build on the same civilizational substratum as those hierarchical ones.

All in all, religion is a mind virus, a mental disease, no matter how hard and skillfully you try to defend it.