This will sturr up some Bigots who are intolerant of other people's Views & opinions. I do accept that religion has hepled & still helping a lot of people to cope with all the problems that they have encountered in their lives. It provides a kind of fortress that life throw at us from time to time,It has given many individuals hope, irrespective of what that hope might lead to....but there are few amongst us, who have taken their religion beyond its intended aim. Because of these fanatical beings, the once high & unquestion ideology called Religion have shaken from once its lofty, pedestal position & sacred grounds to squarely at eye level of the free thinkers, skeptics & other secular groups on this  planet. The battle of the minds didn't start recently, in fact It had started long before the emergent of two of the world's most powerful monotheistic religion.... Christianity & Islam. It all began to emerged around the time when Western Philosophy was in its infant state, started off with Thales of Miletus. Minds from then on began to look at things in an unconventional, unorthodox, untraditional & out-of the-box approached of how we look at life & the truth behind it all. however, Phliosophy was still umbically attached to Religion & had no means or foundations until several hundred years after the likes of Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle opened a pandora's box, that up to this moment cannot be closed. They each expanded on their respective predecessors to ignite a group of intellectual astute individuals that exist within our present midst. Philosophy was a fat child that has it gets older began to shed some pounds. One of the fat was Science or better put Physics. It's through this(physics) that the entire Monotheistic Concept began to turn upside down & still reeling from it. Discoveries by physicists over the centuries have unravelled what religion & their books thought they knew. The icky & fallible hands of those who wrote the torah,bible & koran from these monotheistic faith claiming them to be YAHWEH, Jehovah or God & Allah inspired words that could never be wrong....have proven to be not only wrong but delusional & outright lie. In some cases it was evident that e.g. Christian sacred book The Bible was written out of share ignorance especially in its Creation story. We must remember,that their were a plethora of creation stories in around the basin of the mediterranean, from the days of the Babylonians & Egytians that predates Judaism & Christianity by thousands of years. The Concept of God(s) was a psychological transmission of what was inside the mind of those primitive individuals, relative to us of course..Scince then, God has remained in the mninds of religiously incline individuals refusings in seems to emerge from that hiding spot to world of reality or at least what human's perceived as reality. The mind is real & whatever experience that occurred in the mind & mind alone cannot be considered if it is not objectively seen by others e.g if I can create an image of a unicorn of whatever colour or an elephant that is pink...it will appear very real in my mind but in objective reality it doesn't exist,hence whatever remain in the mind and cannot be seen in reality must be considerd a figment of someone's imagination. Am I saying that GOD is figment of people's  imaginations. There are lot practical ways you can prove what is stated here to verify whether is true or false. Remember that religious individuals will find every means to remained delusional even in when they are confronted by concrete evidence and that what keeps it alive after several thousands of years, It gives hope as long has there is faith that your dice might role in this life that is base on probability,serendipity, chance, luck or whatever name that can be attach to it, but if that faith is hinged on the idea that Yahweh,Jehovah or GOD & Allah exist & one day he/she'll come for you riding on white horses to trumpets blowing & angel singing while the sky  been open to take you up to some place called paradise or heaven, then I think that you really need a psychologist or psychiatrist. Go & search to find God,bring him as evidence & I'll Guarantee you that it will never happen but if I ask you where is god I guarantee you that either you say God is beyond the physcical realms of human persent perception or beyond human understanding,, He/she is spirit/ghost, he/she's timeless,spaceless,changeless & imaterial or whatever the imagination & logical arguments want him/she to be & I'll stand with science and its probing attitude to know, rather to rely on speculation than investigation,experimentation & data collection & verification that the way my mind will graps things. I don't send my kids to school to rely on speculation in their up coming GSAT exams but to rely on the informations they had received from their respective tutors. I cannot rely on Imformation or knowledge that is unverified or obscure,vague,abstract, clouded or very susceptible that whoever is unloading it might deliver a type of cut-the-foot-to-fit-the-shoe argument like a contortionist. So the goodness of religion out weighs a lot of it bad ways for sure when it permeate a lot of good stuff in the cultural psyche of a nation, like empathy, producing action like love your neighbors as you love youself slogans that entwined into the social order for the overall survival of the clan and hence the species. Without putting you in the valley of boredom I'll direct your attention to a vital area and that is  the evolutionary process of the human brain which is very wide, technical & comprehensive so have look at my Facebook Account plnthn or Neville Wright for extensive posts on this very controversial issue or checked with other sites that can enlighten your mind & educate your brain