Religion is part of the human make-up. It’s also part of our cultural and intellectual history. Religion was our first attempt at literature, the texts, our first attempt at cosmology, making sense of where we are in the universe, our first attempt at health care, believing in faith healing, our first attempt at philosophy.

Hitchens frames religion less as a purely theological phenomenon than as an early, all-purpose human technology for explaining and managing life. By calling it part of our “make-up” and of cultural and intellectual history, he treats religious practice as a durable anthropological fact—something humans repeatedly generate—while also implying it is historically superseded in many of its functions. The list (literature, cosmology, health care, philosophy) suggests that religion once served as a proto-institution for meaning-making, storytelling, and coping with suffering before specialized disciplines emerged. The underlying significance is double-edged: religion is acknowledged as foundational to civilization’s intellectual development, yet implicitly criticized as an outdated or unreliable substitute for modern inquiry and medicine.