Not religion per se, but "the religious mindset"
people rarely *become* religious. It's a cycle.
Religious parents have babies - religious parents are not science-learned (for the most part. You cannot combine an equal volume of science and religion in a single brain. At some point, they must cancel each others out)
Religious parents will therefore apply their own sense of logic and reason to the critical stages of their childrens mental development, in early age, with trivial basic questions, the very first quests for scientific knowledge:
Where do babies come from? Storks, not stop bothering.
Why is the sky blue? Jesus made it so, mommy has a headache.
Why is murder wrong? We kill ants all the time.
Critical stage in life. Humans are the bodies and natures of pre-society "cave people"*
"Cave human" existence (Homo sapiens sapiens) 195 000 years approx.
"Civilized human" existence (Homo sapiens sapiens) 5 000 years approx.
^
This is the cause for a lot of evils, for example our obsession around calories and yellow-colored food. We are still "cave humans".
Truth, honesty and knowledge is VERY important to us.
When a cave-child asked a cave-dad why the sky was blue, he would get a very very simple answer. Whatever the answer was, the child would see no reason to ask again, and would recieve no conflicting explanation.
Their relation to truth and fact was very basic.
Ever since the advent of big society (after the agriculture/alcohol cultural revolution), the concept of "LIES!" became very important to safeguard tribal stability, by rejecting everyone elses sense of truth that did not correspond to your own.
By now, "LIES!" is a big part of society, since "LIES!" are all around us.
Even if we find actual, observable truth - such as a moose standing in front of you, or the sky being blue that day - there will always be a symbolic room for "LIES!" even down to pure semantics and existensialism "How do YOU KNOW - that there is a moose there. Maybe it's a hallucination? Maybe it's - The Matrix!"
In order words, people are stupid cavemen, and there is no hope.
*(Archaic Homo sapiens rarely if ever lived in caves. They prefered huts and tents, like todays "nature folks", and caves were probably used as storage facilities, as well as being obvious places for mining, and artistic expression (a cave-wall is safe from rain) It's just, we have a difficult time imagining our ancient forefathers, without switching over to monkey-people or something)
