It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain, emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands, on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his reason, is contradicting himself.
There can be no knowledge of what is good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is destructive to human life.
― George H. Smith
Quote Source: Atheism: The Case Against God
Agreed, to advocate against reason and put aside knowledge by substituting it with faith is akin to committing mass murder. We must not discard entirely religious belief, it is the product of imagination after all and imagination is a truly powerful force which is a most useful tool for coming up with ideas.
Lets treat religion as loose theory at best and consider it as baseless until there is better understanding just as science would treat any idea in science with further understanding. An idea with supporting evidence may evolve to become a theory and many theories with actual proof may eventually be proven but this tendency of religious people to treat their beliefs based on nothing more than faith and fact when they are in fact baseless claims is completely irrational and I agree its very destructive to human life.