The framework:

Every innovation is a trap. Think like how every new technological development comes with a negative consequence/risk. But we are talking about mental (thinking) innovations, which are both a cultural development but also physical evolution of the brain.

Human history is an history of a series of mental innovations that enslave us, whoever dominates that innovation first, becomes the God of those who don't have it and becomes corrupt by that power. Then, as the number of people who dominate that innovation grows, they have a revolution and escape that enslavement. Its Plato's Cave, The Matrix, a Babel Event. This cycle replays the structure of cult->religion->philosophy->science as larger numbers of people dominate the innovation better.
The mechanism by which that enslavement occurs is that only the people who share that innovation are capable of organizing without being converted/corrupted by those who have the innovation, by sheer 4D thinking mind rape.

The first innovation/trap was the capacity of abstract thinking, of being capable of (intentionally or not) come up with events that had not transpassed. Being able to say "if you do this, that will happen", without ever witnessing that fact. Since only a few could do that, everyone else had no means to "doubt" so they could only follow, and these became the Gods of all others, formed the first cities (Pre-Diluvian World) and enslaved the others.
At one point many people dominated the innovation of abstract thinking, and Enki started the first (recorded) Babel event, by spreading the religious thinking method that gave a "narrative logic" to myths, and broke the One god rule into many gods.

The second innovation/trap was naturalistic thinking, the conceptualization of the inner cosmos vs the outer cosmos, that the natural world was not a collective of invisible beings and a thing of itself. From that came Platonism, Alchemy, Astronomy, Math and all early pre-scientific philosophical thinking. The people who could think of the self separately from the world and the world became the Gods of everyone else and thus came the Greek and Roman empires, as well as earlier the Arabic empires.

At one point many people dominated the naturalistic thinking, and Christ started the second Babel event, by spreading a naturalistic belief system that binds inner cosmos and outer cosmos without an intermediary, and innoculates people from the logic of sacrifice and possession. Removing the power of the naturalistic pagan cults.

The third innovation/trap is Scientific Thinking, the gnostic awakening to the confirmation that the natural world is inherently antrophofagic and hostile, in contrast to our capacity to see elaborate perfect platonic worlds in our mind. We are in the cycle of those who dominate the innovation of science becoming the Gods of all others. It's (at least so far) an unbalanced innovation in the sense it gives a lot of power over/knowledge of the outer cosmos, but none of the inner cosmos.
This cycle is also unique in that the resistence to the enslavement is much stronger and the domination of the innovation is far more spread. Usually the other innovations happened from bottlenecks, great floods, civilizational collapses and the initial seed was very small, but not this time. May be a fruit of perspective.

The above narrative is just of the "broad" events, in reality it is a mess, that progression is not clean, there are layovers of all of those eras still existing, and whenever we have a revolution, all of them begin to fight for dominance once again and its a mess. Our current world is such a mess in the faith crisis, exacerbated by the factors I mentioned last.
The revolutions are not clean, like before Christ many proto-christs tried and failed. The scientific religion (Liberalism) tried to replace Christ and failed. And now we are at a point with pagan cults, scientific cults and satanist cults fighting for dominance and so on.

Religions:

In this sense, I talk about religions as "worlds" (The christian world, the jewish world, the islamic world) or cultures, because they are all broad algamations that overlap and encompass far more than their current churches. They are the collective entities that navigated the above framework.

Every religion has both esoteric and exoteric cults and religions, and a feminine and a masculine manifestation. 
The first classification is simple enough to understand from theology, the second not so much.
It refers back to early pre-historic tribal humanity in which we had Matriarchal and Patriarchal tribes, female and male Gods. Cave Dwelling and Steppe Nomadic tribes. Unity/Numbers and Safety maximizers and Exceptionalism and Control Maximizers.

Modern islam is a cult that enslaves Arabs post collapse of the Arab empires, but the Islamic world is indeed the oldest religion encompassing the whole indo-iranian tradition, ancient persia, etc... the origin of the concept of demons and touching tips with the hindus, vedas, etc... in the broad islamic world there are thousands of esoteric and exoteric cults, religions and so forth. Its not because of Child Rapist Muhamad cult that is the youngest Abrahamic religion that islam is relevant in the geopolitics of today.

Judaism is unique in that it never had a masculine manifestation (thus far), Abraham came out of the collapse/revolution of the first innovation from the caanite collapse that happened because their empire became dominated by the feminine manifestation of their religion, the longhouse child sacrifice weak men cult. 
And his cult never really rebuilt an empire after that. Instead, they paired with other empires, being the feminine to their masculine, and that strategy enabled them some advantages that allowed them to be able to pick and raise the next winner, giving enough insight to whoever they wished that they could be the next god empire that dominated, and also part of the revolutions. There is a lot more to be said, such as how modern judaism is a revival of older traditions and not a direct continuity, and all of its inner versions of how it dealt with each innovation, such as the binding of isaac and so on.

Christianism may appear to be the actual newest of these worlds but in truth the broad Christian world predates Christ by a lot, from Platonism, Mitriaism, early jewish prophets, to much older manifestations in the Sky Father early human tribes. But as a distinct movement it only became a thing post-christ. 
Another particularity of Christianism is that it abandoned its own Exoteric cult, the temple, and it then became Satanism. Satanism is the exoteric cult of Christianism. And Christ is the father of Science, Transhumanism and so on.

Summarizing: The world is a fucked cyclical antrophofagic child rape cult, some times just a few people, some times a lot of people, every religion/culure is and has always been part in it, and while there is a meta-elite that rules people from the shadows, they are only trying to deal with the innovations/crisis or taking advantage of them since someone else would (hi moloch). 
And we are slowly making it better.



The main difficulty to debate those things is incompatibility of time scales. In that whole narrative, capitalism is just like, a small fraction, its conceptualized as a small part of one of the innovations. In our timescale its a maaaaaaaaaassive subject, but the modern things are always interacting with the ancient things and if we can't put all of it in context, we are in Plato's cave.
And there lies the massive advantage of cults. It's easy for someone who is from a cult that is reproducing knowledge from a perspective of thousands of years to fit capitalism in his view. It's NOT easy for someone who barely is taught modern history in school to fit this shit in his view.

Progressivism was born of 2 events: The collapse of the masculine manifestation Christian society by means of the faith crisis, with the feminine dominating (the weak man cycle), and from an attempt of Judaism of accelerating the revolution of the third innovation, by means of the creation of the Critical Theory that is supposed to exploit the faith crisis and the behavior of the female manifestation of Christianism and bring about the end of the cycle.