Eliminating Religion?

[Anomalocaris]

I don't think the analogy you used is valid, basically because it adds in another variable, that of quick gain versus effortful gain, which isn't present in religion versus rationality. Seriously, to what good serves a simpler explanation, if it is wrong?

Emotional reassurance. How many idiots cling tenaciously to the notion that a dead jewish apocalyptic preacher loves them specifically and individually, and if sufficiently adored and prostrated before, the dead preacher would exercise infinite power to make that alleged love a worthy end-all and be-all of existence? They would cling to this reassurance even if it must be bought at the cost of infantilizing themselves and denying to themselves, and more importantly to others, the practical advantage of a more fact based world view. In effect, they stole reassurance and passed most of the cost of the enforced ignorance this reassurance requires onto those who would suffer the most from the world not being properly understand.

I knew a person who became religious not because she was taught to be so during what is normally considered to be the impressionable age range. Instead during her schooling years she was highly intelligent and earned PhD in a non-trivial discipline from a prestigious public university in trying circumstances. But after several years she became lonely and probably depressed and appearently acutely needy of reassurances, both social and emotional. While thus vulnerable she was poached by opportunistic xtians and made to believe that there is truth in christianity to make her feel better. She was sufficiently greedy of "feeling better" that it effectively became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. She also found the vapid reassurances christians confers on each other satisfying at the beginning. So she became a Christian. But gradually as reassurance trickled in her need for reassurance also increased. Eventually her needs outpaced the capacity of members of her first congregation to provide. Disappointed she sought out denominations that is even more flippant with its vapid and catered reassurances. Eventually she ended up in a Pentecostal congregagtion, aspiring to the day when tongue speaking also comes to her, and taking giggling delight when other Pentecostals, in between speaking in tongues, uses their flippant "power of prophecy" to reassure her in whatever way she needs reassurance that day.

Is there some individual genetic predisposition to religion? Not any more than there is to crime. But as a species we are genetically predisposed to take what appears to be the easy way out especially when it appears we don't have to later bear a commensurate cost for such an choice. Sometimes this predisposition allows us to find better way to do things that lessens the overall cost to society. Sometimes this predisposition allows us to insist the bible to be true and ignore the possible cost of such an assertion.