I am critical of Dawkins, Dennett et al because they attack "religion" in a generalized way, but then narrowly define "religion" only to mean those religions that require supernatural belief. It's a straw man argument, and it throws the baby (community building, sense of meaning and place in the Universe, inculcation of moral values, personal fulfillment, etc.) out with the bathwater of supernaturalism.

If their argument was more nuanced and they stopped making broad declarations about religion as a whole,, and drilled down to critiques of supernature-believing, faith-based and authoritarian religions, I would support them entirely.

I really don't care very much about what Dawkins thinks. He has his experiences, he did research (I have no idea what research) and I don't know what conclusions he took). I'm not a follower of whoever. I have been a not very believing Christian for too many years to believe whatever whoever states. And if you state "I lived for many years in a Buddhist country, believe me I know", I have no reason to believe you without the real proof of your statement. Living in a Buddhist country gives you surely impressions on which you base your opinion, but still it is a personal one.
I tend to listen, read, look, communicate to and with a lot of people. I have seen a lot of the results of religion that doesn't make me happy, but it is still personal and I will never present it as any truth. Maybe as "my opinion or my truth". Nothing I think is meant to be generalized. I like to have conversations with people about what they think and what their convictions are. I don't care about the written opinions so much, not from the Bible, not from testimonials, not from people that present their opinion as their truth. I know, I tend to be a loner for a reason.

One thing I pray for, Oh Mighty Masters of this web group (for which I humbly express great appreciation), is an 'Edit' capability for my previous posts. Looking back at some of them, I see a missing word or typo which make me appear far less intelligent and/or magnificent than I truly be.

Personally I prefer, when defining words, that people try to stick to dictionary meanings. Religion primarily ascribes to a supernatural controlling power. It can have a meaning also of worship for anything. When I have watched Dawkins he tries to use the primary understanding of religion. I’ve read quite a few of his books and watched numerous debates and presentations and what I see him doing, and I hope I follow his example, is using provable, verifiable evidence as a benchmark for belief. If something is outside that realm then it is open for criticism. Ideas are always fair game whether those who hold such beliefs are offended or not.

I think the human impulse to religious behavior and religious thinking is most likely an evolutionary adaptation unevenly but broadly dispersed in the population. I doubt it will be going away in the next few hundred thousand years. At the root of it is probably just a need to balance the complex workings of our oversized brain to prevent unnecessary emotional suffering. We still have that need.

Many of our other institutions we are able to update as times change, but people are hesitant to change religious institutions because we have the idea that they are sacred, and must not be tampered with. So they remain in the first century. When we realized putting leeches on people to suck out the bad blood wasn't really helping the patient we didn't abandon medicine, we updated it. When France got fed up with their feudal system they didn't abandon government, they had a bloody revolution and changed it. When tens of thousands of people per year were flying through windshields to their death we didn't abandon automobiles, we invented seatbelts, and then airbags.

Dawkins et al are wrong to call for the abandonment of religion. It is ignorance that we need to abandon. It's an understandable mistake because religion isn't just a few decades obsolete; it's two millennia obsolete! (in the case of Christianity)
It looks so stupidly vestigial now that it seems useless. But it serves a need that will not go away even though it serves extremely poorly. If it is abandoned, it will leave a void that is likely to fill up with nastier bilge-water than is already in it.

Religion is, in essence, just whatever practice a person uses to maintain their peace of mind. If that's yoga or meditation, if it's drinking, if it's golfing, if it's shopping or eating, if it's just adopting a don't-give-a-shit attitude... that's your religion. With the high social polarization we have now it doesn't look like people's homemade religions are all that effective.

Religions aren't just a set of social rules, moral codes, and erroneous descriptions of how we got here and what we should expect after death. At the core of most world religions is a practice. A method of training the mind to out-maneuver its tendency to accumulate unnecessary suffering. A science-based method could be a lot more effective than a superstition-based method, but religion now has such a bad reputation that many people don't want to be associated with it.

There have always been threads of understanding in all religious traditions that were aimed at nothing more than psychological housekeeping, but they were outnumbered and out-shouted by the superstitious factions. They need to be revived and updated, not abandoned, as the horsemen would have us believe. Having a scientific outlook alone isn't enough. Humans need a regular mental practice that counters our natural attraction to misery. That's what religion is.

To me, a religion involves the worship of some perceived 'God' that is our master, benefactor, creator, etc. So if the belief does involve such worship, I think it is not a religion.

I do not worship earthly, celestial or imaginary Gods, but I do marvel at the bounty of Mother Earth, her beauty, her wonders, even her power. However, I do not believe that Earth creates avalanches, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc. to punish mankind for our 'sins' as most imaginary Gods are claimed to have done.

I do believe that mankind must respect and take care of Earth ... at which we have done a ultra lousy job ... as we keep fouling the water and the air in our pursuit of wealth. Our actions make it more difficult for Earth to sustain human life, but she will survive long after humans become extinct on this planet. On the other hand, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma says not to worry because his God can fix any environmental concern in a flash. No wonder the USA is in such trouble.

A finely written article. Where would you place Daoism in this scheme, bearing in mind, to the best of my knowledge, that there is no word in Mandarin for god? The nearest equivalent is 'ziran' which, when translated means, naturally or the way of nature.

Oddly enough, the origin of the word religion from the Latin is unclear. it seems to have started with reading the same text over and over again, may have mutated to a set of practices taken up as an obligation, and only in latter antiquity to be associated with Gods of any kind. So the New York Church of Humanism or the Ethical Culture Society would be a "religion" to Cicero but not to Augustine. So I would be offended by Dawkins criticizing the Humanist "Church" I used to belong to. Dawkins should stick to criticizing people trying to push non-verifiable propositions onto other people by virtue of the propositions' ties to a deity of some kind.

Every person with OCD has rituals. I have rituals too. I have philosophy. I really don't understand what a non-supernatural religion could be. If we can have philosophy, ritual and community without religion, would a non-supernatural religion just be those 3 things plus arbitrary dogma? I mean dogmatic rituals and the dogmatic insistence on using religious terms?