An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences

An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/). The article was about memes. And it presented religion as a meme: a viral idea that propagates partly through terrorizing the host mind ("If you don't believe, if you don't spread this meme, you'll burn in HELL!" - although it was more nuanced than my one-sentence summary...)