I used to think the same thing. (And I am an atheist BTW.) However... People seem to have a very deep-seated need to believe in some kind of greater power, cause, or movement, and when religion fades away, most of them seem to replace it with an ideology of some sort. And then they can become every bit as fanatically devoted to that ideology as any holy inquisitor ever was to the Roman Catholic Church. Friedrich Nietzsche anticipated the war of competing ideologies that would take place in society when traditional religion faded away, and he was right, as the bloody history of the 20th century illustrates.
If we could get rid of religion and be very rational beings I would completely agree about the desirability of eliminating religion. Sadly, as the late scifi author Robert A. Heinlein pointed out man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing one. And all too often people devote their mental energy not to seek facts and truth, but to justify conclusions they've already reached for largely emotional reasons. In that sort of setup, religion can actually be a stabilizing factor in society, and serve a useful function.
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