Anton La Vey said “the grey area” between Religion and Psychology needed a
bridge. As someone who is from a religious background I can testify by observation of my groups and by watching other groups of religions that
Masochism plays a big role in most religions. Madonna watching her mum dance around with her knees on beans in the kitchen floor made quite an impression?
I tell myself personally, in dark moments “they’re all going to laugh at you”

I like Religion, other than Plutonium and a handful of other devices, it really is what a person does with it.

My own mish- mash of Christian , Buddhist and “Satanic” symbols
have served me well. I like believing that staring at pictures of people I like
will give them good vibes.

Dear God, please save me from all your people? Sure.

The best way in life is to be kind and treat others like you want to be treated.
How much you respond to being mistreated is up to you. In my philosophy.
I have noticed that “karma” type effect from ones own bad behavior.

Maybe people don’t want to get rid of religion as much as it’s bad side effects.
People even worship the Earth. Persons with no faith usually just turn their
favorite philosophers into their god’s or idols.

Our current state of affairs would seem to result from the worship of Money and Power, here on Earth.

The reason that many liberal theologians see religion and evolution as harmonious is that they espouse a theology not only alien but unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=1e3851a3-bdf7-438a-ac2a-a5e381a70472

Excerpt

So the most important conflict [snip] is not between religion and science. It is between religion and secular reason. Secular reason includes science, but also embraces moral and political philosophy, mathematics, logic, history, journalism, and social science–every area that requires us to have good reasons for what we believe. Now I am not claiming that all faith is incompatible with science and secular reason–only those faiths whose claims about the nature of the universe flatly contradict scientific observations. Pantheism and some forms of Buddhism seem to pass the test. But the vast majority of the faithful–those 90 percent of Americans who believe in a personal God, most Muslims, Jews, and Hindus, and adherents to hundreds of other faiths–fall into the “incompatible” category.

Statistics support this incompatibility. For example, among those thirty-four countries surveyed, we see a statistically strong negative relationship between the degree of faith and the acceptance of evolution. Countries such as Denmark, France, Japan and the United Kingdom have a high acceptance of Darwinism and low belief in God, while the situation is reversed in countries like Bulgaria, Latvia, Turkey, and the United States. And within America, scientists as a group are considerably less religious than non-scientists. This is not say that such statistics can determine the outcome of a philosophical debate. Nor does it matter whether these statistics mean that accepting science erodes religious faith, or that having faith erodes acceptance of science. (Both processes must surely occur.) What they do show, though, is that people have trouble accepting both at the same time. And given the substance of these respective worldviews, this is no surprise.

It seems not unlikely that a greater questioning of ‘why things are the way they are in the universe’ is dulled by having a fallback-mythology; similarly, should push come to shove in the search to answer actual instances of those sorts of questions, a person who has an alternate solution in which they actually ‘believe’ is likely to be less-than-tenacious in their pursuit.

Sure, on the more alarming end of the spectrum, accepting “religious-based explanations for real world phenomena” has, it would seem, impinged on the collective intelligence of humanity (I’d go into how I think this has occurred, but I think you already did nicely), not to mention the concerns you raised about public policy.

However, many religious adherents see no conflict between scientific discovery/knowledge and religious faith (e.g., the theory of evolution does not contradict the story of creation because of the metaphorical nature of the Bible). Perhaps more instructive than the pie chart of adherents you provided would be a percentage of those adherents whose religious beliefs do not contradict or belie scientific inquiry and critical thought. My guess is that this manner of approaching faith and reason is more common than the tone of your article would suggest.

I think the crux of my difficulty in sorting out my patently experienced disagreement with much of what you’ve written here is this: It seems to imply that eradicating religious belief is not only a good idea, but one that is possible. Am I mistaken? If not, what would you suggest be done with the reality of it?