Generally speaking...

[Trolldor]

Preacher has no point.
The brain operates on variables. You know the variables you can make a decision.

[hiyymer]

but I'm not on some rationalist delusional trip that eliminating religion would change the world,

See this is where I think you are 100% wrong. eliminating religion would radically change the world. Think of all the theocracies that are out there, nations with close to 1% atheist populations(openingly) through force and fear tactics, primarily Islamic nations of course.

I don't know how anyone could seriously proclaim that a world without religion would not change the world.

Religion is not a cause. Religion is an expression of what we are. It is an expression of the groupism and territoriality that is part of the mechanism by which we survive and replicate. You don't look at a Chimpanzee and say, hey they shouldn't engage in dominance behaviors within the group but be more "democratic", or they shouldn't beat the male from the other group to death when they catch him on their territory. We understand that that is part of the natural mechanism by which the Chimpanzee species survives. Nature isn't pretty. Can't you see that you are creating a circle. You are saying we humans are special. We are different. We can decide to be something other than what we are. That is quite similar to saying that we are special because we are created in God's image. There is no naturalistic rational scientific justification for the position that humans are uniquely rational and free of our own evolved nature. It's only what we experience in our heads and all we have to hold onto when we deny the force of our own social nature which is expressed as religion, or as a Dawkins creationist hate-fest, or as the local communist chapter meeting. Hawking, who you could characterize as the ultimate scientist, says it quite bluntly. Free will is a "theory" of the brain, not a reality. Your irrational feeling in your head that everything should be rational and there should be no religion makes you right and puts you on top and is nothing but the mechanism happening; just another "religion".