Religion is, if nothing else, a group phenomenon. Its fables, its rituals, its chants, all operate at the group level and in fact almost all religions demand frequent group meetings. So although some individuals may claim to define their own religion, from a sociological standpoint religion is what the group says it is, which in turn is usually what their leaders say it is.
You're committing the common error of taking too narrow a snapshot. If you expand your view you'll see that every few generations, entire religious communities rise up in orgies of unspeakable violence. The death and destruction perpetrated by these religious people during those orgies, and even worse the damage done to civilization itself, far outweighs the good things they do during the lulls. Gang violence, crimes of passion and drunk driving are statistical footnotes compared to:
- The religious persecutions of entire ethnic groups after Christianity was made the state religion of Rome
- The spread of Islam by the sword
- The Crusades
- The obliteration of two entire New World "heathen" civilizations (Christians kill other Christians but they don't burn their libraries and melt down their art objects)
- The Inquisition
- The euphemistically named "Reformation" which was really a hundred years of non-stop war between various Christian sects
- The thousand years of antisemitism which virtually defined European Christendom
- The Holocaust in which it culminated
- The persecution of the Palestinians which is Israel's way of thanking the world for rescuing half of the Jews from the Holocaust
- Or today's impending Nuclear Holy War among all three major branches of Abrahamism. (So far the Rastafarians have managed to be models of peace and charity, but check back in on them in five hundred years.
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Considering that religion dominates most human cultures, and considering that belief in the supernatural is an
archetype (an instinct we are born with, programmed into our neurons by evolution, either the result of a random mutation passing through a genetic bottleneck or a survival trait from an era whose dangers we can't imagine), it requires tremendous conscious effort for most people to become atheists. (I am a rare exception, raised by atheist parents who never talked about religion.) For an "irrational, compulsive, unscientific" person to make the tremendous intellectual and emotional effort to override his instinct and to reject years of parental and cultural conditioning, in order to become a pariah who has to hide his beliefs from half the people in his life, is probably a rare phenomenon, I would expect that a person who can do that is probably a sociopath since in the absence of tremendous intellectual effort it aligns with other sociopathic behavior.
