Don't know about all religions but some began with clear use-cases. To retain (or even achieve) power over people. For example The Old Testament was written/compiled for this very reason[1].
Now the religion of SMTP.. I often wonder how the spam situation would look if we redid SMTP and required certified TLS. What's worse, we still use SMTP for real stuff every day, I get emails from Etrade, Fidelity and others that I simply don't want flying through cyberspace decrypted even if they don't contain real information.
The people who designed FTP were not stupid: they did the best they could operating under constraints that kids who have grown up with all the serious work of implementing the Internet already done for them cannot imagine. It's easy, with decades of hindsight, to claim you could do better. I bet you couldn't.
