Humans do not "intellectually need" to worship. You never see infants randomly fall over and begin to pray at shit.

This is learned appeasement techniques, centered on religious nonsense that imagines all-powerful invisible, intangible, all-knowing beings that will cast you to eternal torment if you disobey their stone-age dictates.

If all trace of religion magically vanished from this earth, no one would spontaneously re-discover and begin to worship christ/allah/yahweh/buddha/vishnu/etc in a century.