Is life more satisfying as an atheist or religionist?

[FrustratedFool]

Lot's of secular, even atheistic, literature, music, film, art, etc.

I'd say this is true of cultural products from our own time. Recent novels, movies, etc., are unlikely to be religious unless they're specifically aimed at that market. 

But if you want to read anything older and enduring, religion will be impossible to avoid. Like it or not, the best of the arts in Europe was Christian for a very long time. And I would hate to give up painting and sculpture or classical music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque period. Blake was a great genius, and thoroughly Christian, though in a minority tradition. The other Romantics are less explicitly Christian but wouldn't exist without that background. 

The Tale of Genji, though on the surface about nature and human relations, is soaked in Buddhism. Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan Buddhist art is wonderful. Even Proust, though very gay and sexual, could only come from a Catholic country. 

I think that a sympathetic engagement with their beliefs is only to our own benefit, because a world without all that wonderful stuff would be very poor.

I don't think anyone would want to get rid of works inspired by religion from the past.

My case is simply that it is highly arguable that the best cultural works are religious.  Both Shakespeare and Scorsese are secular and better than the majority of medieval Christian texts.   

Would you not count Proust as secular?  A Catholic milieu, sure, but the text itself isn't Catholic.  I would think everything not explicitly religious is secular.