Your points are correct for the most part, but still a little restricted by your implicit assertion that all religions are Abrahamic in nature. There is, for example, a tradition of atheism in Hinduism[1] - rejection of the "fact" that there is a guy in the sky who created everything. It deals mostly with human action - its nature and motivation. And fwiw, very few, educated, Hindus I know (anecdotal) are even aware of this. You are correct when you say advocating religious views can lead to encouraging extremists, but I think you might be also dismissing, with little study, the moral teachings and the focus on self without the need to resort to a god-figure that some religious traditions espouse. (I only know of this in Hinduism, there might be more.) I'd rather learn from that rather than dismiss it as irrelevant gibberish.
This is not to say that religion is some sort of magic cure-all, but that some traditions do exist - possibly out of our individual experience - which cannot be easily dismissed but which should be merged into our views as well. I treat religion as a conduit to self-improvement, not as a way to book my place in heaven, which is why your pretty angry,dismissive view of religion seems restrictive.
If you want to improve yourself you should look into what evidence based reasoning has to say about what you want to discover the answer for, and in particular what modern science has to say about it. Think of it this way. Think of any question upon which we once had a scientific answer, however inadequate, but for which now the best answer is a religious one.
Abandoning evidence based reasoning leads to error quickly. Arguing from absolute certainty, which is what faith is (it claims to posses the absolute truth, the words of the creator of the universe no less), is bound to lead to errors. Not testing your ideas does that to you.
Take for example animal rights and if it is right to kill animals. Judeo-Christian faiths are clean on this: god gave humans dominion over the earth, and in particular animals for food. End of story. Why should I give rights to my food?
But what is right follows from what is true. If animals are indeed sentient, if they are self-aware even, if they can suffer, are scientific questions. If scientific answers to these questions are positive, then some of us sufficiently evolved, aware humans can't ignore the fact, and we have no choice but to treat animals differently than what we do now. Some countries like Spain have gone so far as to give protection and right to life to higher primates, our closest cousin apes.
I see where you are going, but I fear this is getting way too meta for the thread :)
I never said that I blindly followed what was being taught to me; if it sounded like that, then its just poor phrasing on my part.
I do test what has been handed down to me by my elders. For the most part, because of the loss of most of the reasoning behind "religious teachings" - loss of books, extremists killing off opposing points of view, colonial trauma etc etc - it's very easy to dismiss religious traditions as random musings, because there is no textual evidence for ideas and thoughts. For eg. Hinduism is a little mixed about animal rights. I was specifically brought up as a vegetarian because of the tradition in our sub-sub-sub-branch of Hinduism that animals had rights. OTOH, there is some random garbage about women being second-class citizens which I never aim to follow, because it is patently unsound.
I guess my point is, I am not going to dismiss years of thought, just because they are years old, without putting some amount of thought into figuring out if it makes sense - in that sense I think we agree with each other. Religion tackles more things than we imagine when we learn to become atheists - its sole purpose need not be cataloging a list of dos and don'ts and it might end up provoking you to ask more questions about yourself.
My religious tradition has primarily been a bunch of ideas and thoughts and there is no real "book" which lays down the law. Maybe that is why I think from this perspective and why I cannot just dismiss these ideas without some introspection.
FWIW I didn't read any super-mario's posts as angry. Stripping religions of their gods and seeing what is leftover is an interesting thought experiment, it works particularly well with buddhist principles, but if you still seriously cleave to some sort of faith, either in gods or the authority of institutions and mortal peoples representing gods, then I can see how his posts could be seen as dismissive and confronting.
You have to take a hardline against the religious nutters - they imbibe everything with their craziness.
This is not to say that religion is some sort of magic cure-all, but that some traditions do exist - possibly out of our individual experience - which cannot be easily dismissed but which should be merged into our views as well. I treat religion as a conduit to self-improvement, not as a way to book my place in heaven, which is why your pretty angry,dismissive view of religion seems restrictive.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism
Edit: added wikipedia entry