I understand what you're saying, but it's not going to stop me from being generally and vocally anti-religion.
I'm someone whose brain is not wired for spiritual experience; I've never had one nor even wanted to have one. Because of this, for a long time, I didn't really understand the point of view of religious people. I took a course on the psychology of religious belief, in which we read (among other things) William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience. It's a seminal work in the field, and while the field has made quite a lot of progress since then (as Desrtopa points out below), it's still very informative. This helped me realize that others' brains were doing things that mine wasn't.
Nevertheless, religious claims are explanations for such experiences, and they're bad explanations. The popularity of those claims is harmful to rational pursuits. Decrying religion is about the claims and not the experiences, despite how many people seem unwilling to separate the two. For me, the falsity and harmfulness of the claims trumps the genuineness and significance of the experiences, if the latter is dependent on the former (but it doesn't seem in principle like it should be).
For me, the falsity and harmfulness of the claims trumps the genuineness and significance of the experiences, if the latter is dependent on the former (but it doesn't seem in principle like it should be).
I agree with the first part of your statement, and as for the second -- yes, exactly. I don't think the experiences are dependent on the claims. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the claims [regarding the existence of a god or gods] originated as a rationalization of the experiences [the particular chemical state that produces, in human brains, a sense...
In the comments of a recent thread, another poster pointed out that religious individuals tend to report higher levels of happiness than nonreligious individuals. I suggested that the social network of churches, rather than the direct effects of theistic belief, might be responsible for this difference, and after doing a bit of searching around to see if the available studies support such an explanation, found a study that indicates that this is indeed the case.
Religious churches may be far from optimal in the services they provide to communities, but they have a great positive impact on the lives of many individuals. And not just as friendly social gatherings and occasional providers of community service; I've known priests who were superb community organizers and motivational speakers, who played an important role for their congregations to which I know of no existing secular analogue.
It seems probable that a secular organization could effectively play the same role in a community, but would anyone be likely to take it seriously? Since people who're already religious may be inclined to reject the value of a secular authority filling the role of a church, and atheistic individuals may not be inclined to attend, either due to reversing the stupidity of religion, or due to asocial and anticooperative values, it's uncertain whether a secular organization that adequately filled the role of a church would get off the ground in the first place in the present social climate.
So, what are your feelings on the prospect of secular church analogues? Do you think that they're appropriate or practical? Do you expect them ever to become common in real life?