Well, i that's the case Fvck religions and be a utilitarian. I prefer pleasure to utility, so I'll hope you find my secular hedonism acceptable as well (God not included or excluded)

A first grader could understand what good and bad manifestations of religion are: blowing up a plane vs. Salvation Army collections would be a simple example.

Well, its true in the case of Muslim extremism that we see today, but Jehovah's Witnesses try to convert too and are not dangerous. Again it comes down to good or bad manifestations. I don't logically understand why you can assert and believe in the bad but deny that it can be good...so many things in life are not intrinsically bad but can be abused. Like my example of water saving your life or drowning you..

You are presenting this as though it is typical of religion in the world today, but only a small percentage of Muslims advocate genocide, so it's not a fair or accurate representation.

Um, you do know that mathematically improbable coincidences are absolutely inevitable and scientifically explainable, right?

Likewise ghosts and past life regressions. The dispassionate scientific investigation of these notions has yielded a big zero. People can attribute these things to any god they want, but that's just adding folly to delusion as near as I can tell. Are these notions comforting? Of course. That's a good reason to be suspicious of them, and do the hard work of investigating them.

And as to this notion of God not wanting us to be automatons, well, it seems as though most versions of Christianity end up with the elect being altered back to pre-Edenic perfection, to spend eternity glorifying the creator. That sounds pretty damned automated (and terrifyingly pointless). Obedient robots seem to be exactly what god intends for us to be in the grand scheme, though I have heard apologists hem and haw that we will somehow have perfect free will in the hereafter, but will somehow never ever do anything that isn't 100% pleasing to God because we will completely share His nature. What twaddle.

It's not surprising that church membership yields warm fuzzy benefits. Having a community united in common cause or belief, a place to go where you feel accepted, surrounded by people who are likely to help you out in times of need, these are fine things, though they can also yield the dreaded "us vs. them" herd mentality if said groups aren't vigilant. And there are other trade-offs. Membership usually involves an agreement, implied or explicit, to abide by certain norms, and not to question or dissent.

I can think of no better image to keep on one's mental screen than those photographs of lynchings in the South. In them, you see groups of genteel church-going folk, dressed in their Sunday best, smiling with warm satisfaction as a body hangs from a tree limb above them. (No matter how happy we are in our spheres of choice, we should keep such images available to our consciousness, and do the occasional gut check to make sure we aren't headed in a similar trajectory.) Churches can and often do achieve tremendous good. Many secular organizations have been studying how best to emulate the effectiveness of church groups in providing for charitable causes, disaster relief, etc. while avoiding the dangers that lurk in the shadows of complacency and conformity.

Sorry no. Islam (to which I'm assuming you are referring) does not teach people to blow-up airplanes. Just as the Bible did not tell medieval Christians to torture Jews to death in order to convert them. Religions are not "bad" or "good"; people are. Religious belief, in itself, is not the cause of evil behavior, it only provides the excuse.

Spend your time talking to truly religious Jews, especially ones that have spent time in Israel. The devout do not want peace. The devout want the temple restored and to carry out God's will to slaughter their enemies in his name.

Precisely the kind of illogical, irrational thought that religion encourages/demands. The kind of lack of critical thinking that allows people to be happy and satisfied while killing other people.