Religion is evidence of man's ignorance

If my definition of religion seems broad, it's because religion is a very broad concept. I find your definition of it to be quite narrow since you require it to have a figurehead or creator of some sort. That is simply not true. The NRA is an organization formed around an opinion about guns. Patriotism has to do with how you feel about your nation and government. In my definition of religion that you quoted above I did mention religion is organized "to gain spiritual fulfillment". Religion helps us understand our personal spiritual journeys. It attempts to answer questions such as "do we have souls?", "what happens when I die?", "Is there good and evil?", etc. These are "spiritual" questions. Buddhism is definitely a religion. It is in fact one of the major ones by definition. Science is not a religion but atheism definitely is. You can be polytheistic, pantheistic, monotheistic, atheist, or agnostic. You can be a part of any religion and still believe in science. Although some religions do conflict with science on some topics, they are still are separate aspects of life. I cannot stress this enough. You tend to focus this debate on the western perspective of religion. However you overlook many major religions that don't rely on a deity. Taoism, Confucianism, and even New Age to name a few. You are correct in that science is constantly changing. It is a very useful tool and helps us solve lots of problems and make many discoveries. But science can only deal with the physical. No matter how much we discover with science, it will never tell us who we are or what the purpose of life is. That is why people turn to religion. To give life a purpose. There is inherently a desire in every person to answer their spiritual questions. No one knows the answer and there is no way to prove these answers. Even if we mapped out the entire universe and understood the flow of everything, that would not answer the question about our spiritual selves. In order to answer those questions, the individual needs to look within and not without. Religion acts as a guide for that and is very helpful to many people. It is not for everyone, but it shouldn't be discredited and called fruitless just because it doesn't jive with one world view. Not all religions justify cruelty. Just because someone believes in something more than the random, calculated, machine-like universe does not make them "mentally disturbed". We have made some discoveries with science but we are still very blind and ignorant to what is going on. Humans arent just fleshy machines made up of cells that will be fully understood. We are much more than that. People today are arrogant in their understanding of things when the reality is that we really don't know anything and aren't even close. We have no idea what life is. We have no idea where we came from (just in terms of where life first spawned). We don't know at what point we really die. We don't even know what bacteria is in our own belly buttons. (http://www.theatlantic.com...). To insinuate that we know anything and that science has more answers than religion is presumptuous to say the least. In science we are just as ignorant as we are in religion. Religion is not going anywhere anytime soon because people need it. They will continue to create new and more evolved religions until the end of our species. Our best hope is that one day our understanding of science will merge with aspects of religion one day for the better of all humanity.