You pray to the alter of "smartness" and your God is no less vengeful and irrational as all the others!
Science works. Religion doesn't. When I want someone to fix my broken arm or build a bridge, or pretty well anything else I would want to do, I'm going to go with the system that works.
You cannot just brush that part aside!
To say there are smarter options now is different from saying it didn't work then. Getting illiterate people to gather for a sermon where they could be told to avoid shellfish that could kill them and to avoid harming other people (because an invisible wrathful being would catch them even if the society they lived in did not) served a purpose then that we have developed better systems for since.
Brains are glorified pattern matchers, but we hadn't yet figured out how to judge the quality of a perceived pattern, so in a desperate fit of apophenia, religions naturally emerged. Eventually we stepped back and developed systematic ways of distinguishing good patterns from bad. We call this system science.
Edison said, "I didn't fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb; I only needed to find one way to make it work." I see the thousands of religions that humans have come up with as those 2,000 non-light bulbs, and science as the one method that works. Now that we have a working light bulb, we can throw out those other attempts.
I'm also curious why you believe evolution to be a metaphysical concept. From my POV you're introducing unnecessary, loaded terms like "religion" to explain phenomena that are already explained without them.
"Religion" is much more than "just the word for the collection of knowledge about how the society should operate". Maybe "ethics" is a better term for that? Religion is a very loaded term. The history of religion represents an ecosystem of competing industries vying for power over each other. I agree that religion has been used as a tool to influence the behavior of human society for both good and bad, but so has advertising and marketing (bacon for breakfast, diamonds for wedding bands, KFC for Christmas, etc.). Does that make advertising religion? Is religion a form of advertising? Or are they both just superfluous terms for something more simple: evolution.
Or whatever. I am just saying you can't help but believe, I am not saying there aren't necessarily good or bad beliefs, but I am saying that one belief or another doesn't make you "smarter."
Is not the idea of intelligence itself a kind of belief? Have we ever seen it in a microscope? How can you definitively answer, e.g. the Chalmer's zombie problem? The general issue of solipsism, of experience itself? Don't you believe that those who you love are full humans who hopefully love you back?
(Also I am sorry you keep feeling insulted, not sure what to do about that. Please know I fully implicate myself in all this as well.)
Being smart is the opposite of irrational. Vengefulness is orthogonal to correctness. If the punishment serves to increase the length of your life, it is rational (equivalently, smart). If not, it is stupid.
Would it not be more correct to say that the opposite of irrationality is, well, rationality? This is important because rationality is something I assume we agree is a characteristic of humans. Humans can't help but be rational, which is why irrational behavior can be the exception that proves the rule. To say "being smart" is the opposite suddenly creates a a somewhat unscientific rift among human animals, doesn't it? But I do get why you want to say that for your argument, but you should be a little more nuanced in order to get one over on me. Not that I am particularly smart or anything, but just because I am listening to what you are saying.
But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you? That is a somewhat novel argument in this context.
If you are smart, you must be rational. The contrapositive must also be true. If you are irrational, you cannot be smart. My comment points out that your argument that worshipping at the altar of smartness is irrational makes no sense.
> But otherwise, I think I see what you are saying, but why is living a long life the goal for you?
This is self-evident. If you die, all other rewards lose their utility.
Edit to your edit: I have had the pleasure to know and study with some of the "smartest" people around in the hard and soft sciences, and let me tell you they can definitely act irrationally (we use the euphemism "eccentric" to gloss over this). Consider a genious mathematician who happens to have OCD. Does their sometimes irrational behavior mean they can't be smart?
Have you ever seen "smartness" in a microscope?
Your scenario makes no sense because in both cases, you are dead, and dead people have no preferences.
How is that different from belief in certain religions, where sex is solely for procreation? Everybody puts some sense of what they want to achieve over biological urges for immediate hit of dopamine. The only difference is that I say that these choices should be rational.
In general you are suddenly being prescriptive rather than descriptive, which implicitly seems to show you agree with what I am saying about belief, but you simply think that humans should change fundamentally. Which is fine, but it is itself a belief you have that you contextualize your life with!
That feeling comes from dopamine. If you actually believe that feeling is better than actually living to experience that feeling again in the future, a heroin dealer will be more than happy to help you out.
> but you simply think that humans should change fundamentally.
Only in that they should be more rational. I don't think that is an onerous request. Many people already try to be.