Margaret Atwood's theory about the sublimation of religious feeling:
I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring … . Suppose that the religious thing is kind of a given and you can’t act it out using your old figures and images, because time has moved on and people no longer quite believe, and if you announce that you have seen a bunch of angels sitting in a tree, you’re likely to be locked up in a bin, so instead you put them on planet X, where they’re like to feel quite at home.
The Dish 