How about like this...some ingredients and outcomes:

Ø      
the human urge to devise some comprehension of the immense and
amazing world around us

Ø      
the biologically received mental activity that appears immediately in an infant and continues onward to imitate or learn from the parents and all the quicker smarter attractive others

Ø      
overlain eventually with a need to alleviate the distressing
incomprehensibility of the fact that one's lifetime ends in death/personal
extinction

Ø      
combined in a powerfully complex brain with the human reflex to fantacise and imagine presences of all encompassing anthropomorphic entity or entities, and this
crystallizing evolving into beliefs, received belief structures, and social groups called
religions

Ø      ...including human urges to control and lead others, to gain influence and an upper-hand...

Ø   ...combined with the instincts to convey ad receive personal "knowledge", share understanding... 

Ø  ...resulting in emergence of "Godmen" of various sorts -- and mythologies of saviors who can usher one to imaginary lands of afterlife.