There are always two sides to the coin.
You see, if you had posted this sooner, then your topic would've turned out more towards the type of discussion you were hoping to follow. You can't expect to map out a blueprint then wait until a bunch of random people follow it so you can advance with your questions. This whole time I was under the impression that you blindly hated religion and posted this topic to entice religious people and flame them.
However, as you lightly aluded to, religion has done plenty of good along with bad. I mean, even though religion has hindered some aspects of scientific growth in the past, it has also played a large role in promoting scientific growth. The nations we know now wouldn't be the same (or even be here) if it weren't for religion. Our advances in medicine wouldn't be at this level if it weren't for religious organizations promoting medicine (heck, Muslims created the first Medical schools). I too am a man of science, but you shouldn't assume that people of religion aren't "logical". I am a firm believer in God, but I am also researching in Biochemistry; I believe in evolution but I also believe in creationism. Science hasn't gotten to the point where it can disprove the major things in religion (like creationism of man and the universe) because we're still at the birth of understanding evolution, and we still don't understand our universe, let alone the stars outside of it.
And I don't understand how it is dangerous for people to follow "old religious" books. Your textbooks are outdated because people make newer discoveries and/or disprove statements in older textbooks. There is nothing out there that has "disproved" anything from religion (such as the Quran, which hasn't changed since the day it was written), so why would the book become outdated? Can't you accept that there are people of science who also follow religion deeply? Hell, some of our greatests scientists were strict Jews, but did their religious faiths hold back or dismiss their discoveries in physics and biology? The only major conflict I see in science and religion is between the creation of humans and the overarching question of how life started. That is a question which might take a millenia to answer, but currently these theories aren't strong enough to dismiss the religious claims.
There might be religious terrorists blowing up buildings, but there are religious insitutions that are helping promote human welfare. Take the genocide in Chilie for example, only the churches and synagoges were willing to "hide" and protect the refugees for essential manslaughter when the United States government was denying them entrance to the country. There might be some churches meddling science, but there are also those who promote human advancement and discoveries. You can't have a biased outlook on religion without looking at both sides, much like how I am not biased for religion even though I am a religious man. It is possible for religion and science to grow side by side, but that can't become possible if we have extreme religious people dismissing scientific claims, nor can it be possible when we have extreme atheists like you dismissing religious claims.
What you're hoping for is an ideal world, and I sure as hell will bet that if religion didn't exist, something else would take its place to create this "separated" feeling of yours. There are always two sides to the coin, and one side cannot physically exist without the other.
