No society aspiring to humane values can tolerate organized religion. This is because religions are based in primitive tribal myths that are full of highly dysfunctional ideas such as homophobia. Even worse, because the books containing these myths obviously don’t update as society progresses, the gulf between the myths and reality grows wider with every century. This leads believers into a state of cognitive dissonance they can only resolve by assuming reality is “wrong” because it contradicts one or more tenets of their mythology.

It’s pretty clear that while many people will always need to be told what to think, we are long past the point where we need to tell such people far better and far healthier stories than the tribal myths of neurotic genocidal goat-herders who lived 3,000 years ago.