organized religions are like government schools...LOL . except they weren't set up to be exactly benevolent.

still...they do serve a purpose. it's a fairly efficient way to easily teach basic spirituality/morality to people in a society, just like schools are a fairly efficient way to teach ppl how read/write/etc. and it's always uplifting to be around like-minded ppl who can encourage you to be a better person, etc...religion provides a good social network and that's why they subscribe to it.

everybody wants to feel loved and belong and religion fills that void for a lot of ppl, and it produces pretty decent individuals generally speaking so I don't knock it. the downside as you said...is that free-thinkers generally don't thrive in religions (unless they are leading them, lol). so you have the herd mentality.

my only gripe with some religions is that they don't encourage ppl to learn and grow on their own once they reach a certain maturity. some of them stifle the free-thinker rather than giving him the tools to keep growing. but this isn't the case for ALL of them though