I was reading a book on the origin of consciousness and a passage sounded similar. It was about how science still today, in some aspects, takes the role of religion in some areas.

Read and decide yourself:

For the modern intellectual landscape is in-formed with the same needs, and often in its larger contours goes through the same quasi-religious gestures, though in a slightly disguised form. These scientisms, as I shall call them, are clusters of scientific ideas which come together and almost sur-prise themselves into creeds of belief, scientific mythologies which fill the very felt void left by the divorce of science and religion in our time.3 They differ from classical science and its common debates in the way they evoke the same response as did the religions which they seek to supplant. And they share with religions many of their most obvious characteristics:

• a rational splendor that explains everything,
• a charismatic leader or succession of leaders who are highly visible and beyond criticism,
• a series of canonical texts which are somehow outside the usual arena of scientific criticism,
• certain gestures of idea and rituals of interpretation,
• and a requirement of total commitment.

In return the adherent receives what the religions had once given him more universally: a world view, a hierarchy of importances, and an auguring place where he may find out what to do and think, in short, a total explanation of man. And this totality is obtained not by actually explaining everything, but by an encase-ment of its activity, a severe and absolute restriction of attention, such that everything that is not explained is not in view.

The book is called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, for those wondering.