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Maybe tangential (and I agree with you), but “religion” is also a misleading word for many of the practices that Christianity later grouped together as “paganism.”

Where these practices often differed strongly from Christianity was that they were not totalizing, overarching, mandatory systems of belief. They were more about practices embedded in daily and civic life -- sacrifices, festivals, acts of veneration, etc. -- than about belief or internal mental state (“Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”). They were also generally quite willing to incorporate gods, heroes, and practices from other peoples encountered along the way.

IMHO, exclusive, universal, doctrinally policed religion developed partly through the interaction of monotheistic traditions with imperial states, which had strong reasons to standardize institutions and identities; although neither Rome nor the caliphates ever achieved simple religious homogeneity.

(And yeah, clearly there's a lot of commonality between many of the cultures derived from early Indo-European migration etc but also incredible diversity and very clear adaptations to wherever they ended up and who they ended up co-existing with)

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The "PIE religion" is the name scholars give to the religious pool that is partially reconstructed from the overlapping evidence (poetry+rituals+myth+gods+vocabulary) of its descendants.

Each descendant subregion of PIE of course imposed its own religious beliefs and local gods. There is no surprise there. The key thread of derivative localized polytheism, often rooted in the same nature-based phenomenon, however persisted across the regions.

Refer to the sibling comment by drivers99. Sky god is not a vague lexeme; it is a critical rooting evidence. You're fooling no one by attempting to cover it up. A shallow dismissal of valid evidence is an attribute of a conman.

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I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the field now as cautionary tales.

No one has any problem with reconstructing some branch-level stuff like Italic or Indo-Iranian. But projecting it back to even Nuclear/Core Indo-European, let alone Proto-Indo-European, is too fraught with problems.

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would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.
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I don't recommend any books written for the general public. Too full of compromises, oversimplifications, and obsolete ideas. I can only recommend learning the field through the same course materials used in training the next generation of researchers. Of course, this is a very large time commitment.
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Honestly David Anthony's book ("Horse Wheel Language") is pretty good, no? Maybe a bit dry for "general public"? Also a bit old at this point?
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The problem with "scholars" when it comes to religion, unlike just for languages, is that scholars often are ideologically biased by the pro-Semitic chain of religion which would have a vested interest in suppressing PIE religious history. For thousands of years, even the local PIE-derived religions were unfairly dismissed as paganism. You'd have more luck talking to an LLM about it, as it's more likely to independently know the full picture, and hasn't yet been brainwashed by "scholars" into asserting otherwise. An LLM can trivially pull together bits of evidence across all of world history. At the very least, consider the shared cgpt chat with ID 6a7e0d45-0478-83ea-8142-8172433fad21.
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Just out of sympathy cause I think there's a legitimate root to the religious point. Your epistemology comes across as extremely weak, with believing LLMs over scholars, and discriminating which scholars are legitimate based on agreeing with your beliefs. It would pay to at least familiarize yourself with the arguments of the other side, suspending in your mind the whole partisan angle.

Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions. What could be happening is some revisionism relying on conveniently selective standards of rigor to bury other scholars. As this is a field famously relying on unclear and very messily transmitted evidence; and these kinds of problems are a very weak point of the humanities overall. But I don't follow this debate at all, so don't have a formed opinion.

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