You asked, indirectly in the title, and explicitly in your post, what is the use of religion.
Oh, and by the way, for someone who asks “Should we abandon religion” you do a one-eighty in your last sentence.
One thing I got from my religion for dummies book is that religion can be divided into three core aspects: belief, ethics, and ritual.
Beliefs is what keeps the religion together. Beliefs give people a sense and purpose over doubtful nihilism. Religious ethics, or morality, shapes people to do good. Rituals tell people what to do to symbolize their presence inside a religion. All three work together to give a meaningful and purposeful life.
There are some religions, like Islam, that takes all of this to an extreme. Having to do multiple practices every day, pray a certain way, etc, is crucial for entire devotion to the cause. Other religions, like Unitarian Universalism, virtually has no belief, ethic, or ritual structure and people are meant to find meaning in things themselves. Of course, UUism is geared towards political, social, and religious liberalism, but that topic shall be debated in another post.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Oe6HUgrRlQ[/youtube]
I’m sure a lot of you have seen this video. This TED talk discusses how atheism can learn from religion. Although this sounds unlikely, I see the future of religion and atheism to come together, to learn from each other and to become less superstitious and less nihilist and materialistic.
This is already happening - many people don’t take the Bible literally anymore, but atheists still have holidays, sometimes exclusively for them (Carl Sagan’s birthday, perhaps?). Recently secular holidays have been flooding the gates. “National Talk Like a Pirate Day”, etc. These events are going to separate people more until every family has their own holidays.
I see the future like this: people won’t debate Christianity VS Islam anymore, people will debate Super-Sting Theory VS Loop Quantum Gravity. A race of super-intelligent lifeforms will argue for and against things like genetic and epigenetic alternations, the use of the computational singularity, etc. The nature of our planet, of our star, of our galaxy, local cluster, Universe, and beyond - will be discovered. We are the ancestors of divine beings.