if the concept and history of religion was totally wiped from everyone’s mind, do you think religions would eventually organically resurface? why?

Yes. This is because religion is something that humans are naturally wired for. As a Catholic, believe that God supernaturally revealed a religion to man, first in Judaism, and then in Christianity via Jesus Christ.

However, there is natural religion. We can know that God exists by reason alone – Aristotle came to monotheism, for instance, yet he was not a Christian or a Jew. And everyone has a confused sense that there is something transcendent. We have desires that nothing limited and Earthly can fill. But every natural desire has something which fulfills that desire. Therefore, there must be a transcendent entity that fulfills our desire for the infinite.

As such, I think that pagan religions of the past, animism, and so forth, are confused manifestations of this innate sense of the transcendent. Of our longing for God. Think of our desire for religion like “the artist’s fingerprint.” The human heart seeks for God, and until modern times, there was never a society dedicated to materialistic atheism. It is not natural to man. People have to be talked into thinking that there is no God, nothing transcendent, and only atoms and the void.