Prolegomenon
Religion is one of key pillars of a society. It provides meaning and guidance to the public and provides reason for the elite to justify their rule to the public. Religion is one of the core separators of man from animal. After a few observation I have concluded that religion could be divided into three different types: Physical religion, Spiritual religion and civic religion. In this article I will offer an overview of said types.
Physical religion
Physical religion is the primordial type of religion. As soon as consciousness began to form questions were asked about the nature of the cosmos and its laws. The first answer was the cosmos are governed by a set of physical, manlike gods. Said gods behaved and thought like men. They created man as their servants. In ancient Mesopotamian religion the gods had to eat like everyone else. Most cities had their own patron god to whom they would feed and worship in exchange for his protection. Kings were mostly representatives of the gods with an exception to Egypt in which the Pharaoh was viewed as a god himself. The gods themselves were not eternal. The Greek pantheon would be deposed, the Germanic one would die in Ragnarok et cetera. This comes to the fact that physical religions were cyclical and none were above the cycle of life. Most antiquity religions behaved like this including pre-Babylon Judaism (or more accurately Yahwism). The only exception to this paradigm was Atenism which had a singular, non-physical god which the Pharaoh descended from.
Spiritual religion
Spiritual religion is a type of religion in which its deities do not possess a physical form and are inhuman. Like their physical brethren the kings of spiritual religions claimed to be representatives of the gods. In spiritual religions, man could not understand the nature of the deities due to their purely spiritual nature. In most depictions, the deities are eternal omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. They are above the cycle of life. Hitherto the establishment of Christianity as the predominant religion of the Roman empire purely spiritual deities only appeared in Post-Babylon Judaism and Atenism.
Civic religion
Hitherto the late 19th century almost all religions were concentrated around deities. Civic religions break this axiom by worshiping ideas instead. Communism is the first religion that comes to mind with its obsession with theory, the dictatorship of the proletarian is simply a theocracy with a red coat of paint. Albeit the real rise in civic religions was in the 20th century. Fascism with it's worship of the autocrat and the state. Utilitarianism with its obsession with happiness and rationality. Environmentalism in particular seems to embrace the original sin aspect brought by Christianity. Even parts of Christianity became civic with the rise of progressive Christianity. Modern neo-pagans also belong to this category. Most neo-pagans use the old gods as avatars for their values. Wotan could represent justice, supremacy and Sol knows what else. Wicca represents this perfectly: The banners of yore with the values of nouveau. Truth is we know far too much in order to believe in physical deities so we just use the yore gods as avatars for what we stand for.