I don't think you get it rigth. See, for the economics/politics side, religion is good. Is a way to tell people what is good, and what is bad.
The only thing bad on the religion for the politcs side is the plurality. With a lot of religions figth against each other, is hard to convince all the people what is good for them, where they should expend, where they should go. Its hard in globalizated world make your bussiness global if in some areas, people stop working in friday(mulism), and in another, they stop on sunday. How can you make global propaganda, if some region don't accept the way people dress, or the music people hear. Everything must be unified if they really want to make globalisation easier.
So, in the future, the best way of the politics control people is making only one religion legal. Was done before, in the 3rd century(when catolicism turned to be the only religion permitted in rome). Was done intelligentilly, because they just doesn't made their religion official, but bougth some of the other religions to their own, like using statues, and making the sunday the official day of worship(used to be saturday, like the jews do, since the first crhistians were jews, but in the roman pagan religions, people used to worship on sunday, because, well, they used to worship the sun - get it now? sunday-> sun's day).
Besides, there is another thing in religion that is efficient: turn someone guilty of other person errors'. One, day, if the economics, get bad, the religion can just say: "Its all happen because there are people out there that doesn't follow our religion, they don't want to pray to our god, buy the things that god want us to buy, they worship in another place, in another day, and all that is wrong, and god is punishing us because of them. Its absolute not related to people in the power making bad decisions!!"
So yeah, while people wanting to take advantage of other stay on the power, you can count that religion will be around for a long time.
"Hardware design isn’t about making the most powerful thing you can.
Today most hardware design is left to other companies, but when you make hardware without taking into account the needs of the eventual software developers, you end up with bloated hardware full of pointless excess. From the outset one must consider design from both a hardware and software perspective."
Gunpei Yoko
