In a communist society, people would be far less alienated from each other and much more likely to participate in collective activities

Yet this is exactly the condition that born religion once. If you didn’t noticed, most religions is based on collective activities and this is the base of their organisations and the danger they pose. We WANT religion to be purely individual, that would means its withering and removed danger from it.

It’s extraordinarily unlikely that people would do so many productive and recreational things collectively but choose to worship individually

Yes that’s why this needs to be at most, even in most basic stage of socialism, treated just as the art or sports or cooking club, anything more and you get religion undermining socialist state and leading to what happened in East Europe. At least because they WILL try to organise and EVERY religious organisation will by its very nature be against marxist state.

this would lead to a de facto clergy.

Yes, and during socialist stage, state having monopoly on violence could keep them in check, but what about later, in communism?

I’m not making a definitive claim that worship/religion is an inherent part of the human condition

We can see a time in the past where nothing like this existed, religion is as much natural as capitalism is, and just as we can eventually eliminate the latter, there’s no reason we can’t do it with the former, just we don’t yet know any successful methods, though some experiments were promising, for example in Czechia atheism stays high even despite dismantling socialism - in other words, state supression of religion works, we just did not did it long enough and made mistakes in it (For the records, i think both China and Cuba are making a mistake with current supportive politics, they just freeze and push back the reaction, once some kind of trouble stands, those will rise as center of opposition, just remember how churches acted as snitch points during the revolution in Cuba).

I just think people are getting way ahead of themselves when they say, “let’s abolish religion lmao.”

Depends what they means about it. Just press the button lol nope, just as in case of the class society which were born from and alongside religion. But i am of strong opinion that religion should be, just as class, combated by socialism with its eventual elimination actively sought of. I think Lenin was on the right way in his article about militant materialism (note the word chosen, not atheism, not antitheism, but militant materialism, as in promoting better alternative to combat trash of history just as promoting socialism to get rid of feudal and capitalist dregs).

Let’s focus on getting to socialism and communism first before we even think about abolishing religion.

No, as above we should strive to do it at the same time, i don’t belive communism could even be reached without getting rid of or at least completely neutralising religions.

religion was catalyst for class society

It’s the other way around. Class society is the cause, not the effect, of religion.

Or rather, they both cause and result from each other… but the base is always more fundamental than the superstructure.

Otherwise we’re getting into territory where the basis of society is not economic, but religious. Which is not materialist but idealist, essentially Hegelian rather than Marxist.

AES states are not classless, therefore not without religion. But definitely working toward religious abolition indirectly through class abolition.