I think the "religion" position is viable if you set aside bias regarding the truth or falsity of specific beliefs and consider the fundamental activity underlying both religion and language. Both arise from encoding our perceptions as a body of symbols. Aside from rare, transcendent experiences and enlightened beings, we only engage reality via perceptual frameworks built out of interlocking symbols, whether or not those frameworks are religious in character.
Setting aside the taxonomically loaded term 'human,' when we meet an entity (or put another way just for fun: when we transform into proximity of a body of stimuli presenting itself as an etity
), whether we assign it personhood near or equal our own depends mainly on whether our perceptual frameworks are able to recognize and network with its perceptual frameworks. Thus some people extend personhood to some or all animals, while others deny it to all but a select subset of homo sapiens.