Espousing Religion is ...

Espousing religion is one of the most ignoble ways of gaining or exerting influence that we can imagine.

When Christian says all non-believers are going to roast in hell for all eternity - they are just trying to convince the 70% of the world that doesn't follow Christianity that they have a superior world view. They may be trying to coerce the weak of spirit and mind into falling in line, thus strengthening the enterprise.

When Muslims says all non-believers are going to roast in hell for all eternity - they are just trying to convince the roughly 85% of the world that doesn't follow Islam that they have a superior world view. Similarly, their overall organization goals are the perpetuation and growth of the enterprise.

There is a pattern here.

When you assert a proposition in everyday civil discourse, the assent of your opponent(s) and audience is obtained by the strength of your evidence, your arguments, and (less relevantly but unfortunately very effectively) your persuasive skill. Civil, rational, intelligent people will be persuaded if the evidence or argument, and how effectively it is presented, are sufficient to overcome the person's bias to the contrary. Sometimes you may present a debate opponent with a baseball, and they will still deny that the baseball exists, but that will only be true if the opponent either has grave perceptual difficulties, or is such a baseball denier that to acknowledge the existence of the baseball would damage their self esteem or world view in some way.

When people that have an advantage, via power, intellect, rhetorical skill, fraud - inappropriately coerce the less intelligent, more gullible, more pre-disposed, to believe that a world view based on the supernatural is a sound view by which to live one's life, then those people are taking advantage of their audience.

If you change your world view, and did not come to the change independently and honestly, then you are being taken advantage of.

You would not go into the wilderness and see evidence of the supernatural unless it is as a shortcut for grouping unknown causes and classifying them as unknown, possibly powerful and possibly malevolent. This is what our bronze and stone age predecessors did ... our medieval predecessors took advantage of, or were taken advantage of, this kind of thinking.

We shouldn't make the same mistakes they did.