I think that you discard religion at your own peril.
Practically speaking, there has never been a successful human society founded on atheism/agnosticism. For better or worse, religion is an inseparable part of every successful culture. I’m a big pragmatist– if society without religion has never worked before, you better give me a very good reason for getting rid of it now… Pointing to an occasional problem with individual policies/actors is not a sufficient reason for getting rid of the whole thing.
On a personal level, I don’t think that atheists have thought their position through to its logical conclusion. Do the John Lennon “imagine there’s no religion/god…” thought experiment. If so, we all are just piles of meat. In the absence of anything sacred/divine about humans, killing a human is no different from killing a cow. It may be impractical/uneconomical to needlessly kill a cow or a human, but “economic inefficiency” seems like a very thin basis for stopping me from slaughtering my next door neighbor so that I can take his BMW out on a joy ride. In particular, society tolerates all sorts of uneconomic behavior. As I said before, that line is pretty arbitrary. Yet somehow I feel that killing a human is different from killing a cow. The only logical justification that I can come up with is that humans are divine.
