Religion as Natural Phemonenon

I think that religion is a mystery to most people. Many atheists wonder how intelligent people can believe such inherently counterfactual ideas. Similarly, believers have to explain why anyone would adhere to any other (i.e. mistaken) religion. Empiricists, on the other hand, who look first for naturalistic explanations for all phenomena, realize that the error was thinking that religion was an exception to this rule. For a long time, materialistic explanations of religion were hard to come by. However, with advances in many diverse fields such as evolutionary psychology and brain imaging, a conception of religion as a natural human behavior has now taken shape. An excellent book that describes this materialistic theory of religion is "Religion Explained" by Pascal Boyer. This book is very accessible even to people without a background in psychology. Another good book on this subject, but considerably more dense, is "In Gods We Trust" by Scott Atran. In future posts, I hope to talk about these ideas more fully, but the fundamental idea is that religion is a natural consequence of the evolution of human intelligence, most notably the development of agency-detection and social interaction faculties. Simply put, our ancestors evolved mental templates that made supernatural agents like gods and spirits plausible.
Unfortunately, this formulation of religion has yet to be adopted by some very influential atheists. Richard Dawkins is a fantastic writer and has done more than anyone in bringing a more complete understanding of evolution to the masses. However, Dawkins sees religion as a unmitigated disaster that stems from simple human irrationality passed down from parent to child in the form of a "mind virus" which will eventually be eradicated as we advance our scientific thinking. Similarly, blogger Sam Harris has written a post with the unambiguous title "Science Must Destroy Religion." I feel that this totally misses the reason that religion exists at all. The position that religion is totally destructive or that it is even possible that it could be eliminated so easily is not supported by the facts. Progressive RJ Eskrow writes that it cannot be definitely concluded that organized religion is a negative force, on balance. In fact, religion has done many positive things, mostly acting as a framework to organize our inherent morality, as I hope to explain later. However, when it comes to describing the world we live in, religion makes a manifold of unsubstantiated claims.
The solution is that atheists need to do a better job of acknowledging the source of religion and what it has done right. At the same time, we have to show how evidence-based thinking works better and demonstrate that human morality is possible without resorting to the supernatural. Religion may be natural, but that doesn't make it inevitable.