A modest proposal

[Thats my opinion]

132. I'll give it a try, reserving the position that this is far too general and complex

a question to make any thoughtful attempt to frame an answer in a forum. So I'm afraid anything I say you will find thin and unacceptable. But since you have asked a question without any vitriol I'll say just a couple of things.

Humans are basically animals with an added dimension to who they are. They are seekers, question raisers without hard answers, capable of looking beyond what they can see. They are always living on the age of Mystery. They sense there is more, but can never fully define it.
This sense of hungering for the more is what we call "soul."

While much of the world ask the what and how questions, many if not all of us ask "why."
Religious people like many others want to bring civility beyond the material to their personal lives and the life of their world. The physical world alone leaves the hunger for the "other.", So they search the skies, tell stories, investigate myths. Kant says this hunger is evoked by the "starry heavens above and the moral law within."

If human nature is self-centered, there is the demand for justice that is not just human interaction. We do live by faith, hope and love--and are poorer without them...So the field of religious ethic grows in the in-between areas of life. They bow before what Rudolf Otto called, "The mysterium tremendum." It is the awe of sensing a beauty and a power which does not lend itself to simple understanding. They seek nobility, and do not know where it comes from, so they postulate "God."

All these things constitute a thirst for the other. So they seek beyond themselves to see clues--not answers. Religious is just the way these wholesale notions are retailed.

But let me hit the question from another direction. We seek and need religion because we see what it produces. Think about Western civilization. What are the stories which tell us who we are? Without religion you would not have them, and you would have a very flat world view indeed.

So we have the first hospitals, places of respite for travelers in dangerous lands--monastic inns, where the nobodies could find food and rest--all in safety.

There are the earliest schools and universities--Cambridge and Oxford in Britain, Harvard and Yale in the US.

We would be bereft without the art, music, poetry, architecture, stories that religion has offered. Europe would be a grey place indeed without what religion has done.

And what would life for us be like without M.L King and the civil rights movement--basically a religious enterprise. Gandhi, Bonhoeffer, Tutu, and millions like them whose names are not even known.

I know the negative side, probably better than you might. That just says religion if very powerful for evil as well as for good.

Why do we need religion?.
Because much of life for all of us would be very one dimensional and grey without it.

This is just a quick off the top of my head bit. I am dyslexic and long for the spell check. Apologies.