“Science might be based on a foundation of rational thought and trial-and-error, but the roots of religion lie in something much more incalculable, and thus much harder to counter.”

I haven’t read the book so I’m not going to comment on it, yet.

What bothers me is the idea of countering ‘religion’.

Why would anyone do something like that?

If any of us sees an error in the ‘scientific’ realm that error is brought forward and fixed but nobody questions the entire realm.
Meanwhile if a religious individual does a stupid thing, like all of us have done in our lives, quite a lot of people blame it on ‘religion’ and ‘faith’.

Rather irrational – hence unscientific – don’t you think?

After all science and religion are about something different.
Science is about how the nature works while religion (‘reliegare’ in Latin means ‘connecting’) is about the ties that transform a mob into a community. Some religions use Gods to achieve this, some don’t – Buddha was a ‘mere’ teacher and Buddhism has no need for any God.

So, again, why counter ‘religion’?

The real problem produced by ‘organized religion’ is that it encourages some people to act in blind faith instead of thinking with their own heads while it offers come callous manipulators the opportunity to use religious teachings as a way to further their petty interests.
‘Faith’ can induce blindness very easily, you know.  No matter if that faith is placed in a religious hierarchy/teaching or in the power of rational thinking.
Just as reputable scientists, Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman  among others, have amply demonstrated the human thinking process is not at all infallible.That’s why our pride about our ability to think scientifically should not be allowed to grow into self-sufficiency. After all that was how Marx, on the footsteps of Plato, reached the conclusion that it was possible for a small number of people (the ‘enlightened’ communists) to know better than the rest of the population how things must be organized… The Soviet Union, the biggest social experiment ever, was ample proof that he was plain wrong.

On the other hand the one thing that all religions have in common is that they teach their members to respect each other – something that the ‘scientific communists’ never did. Some religions even teach that all human beings, irrespective of their creed, are to be respected. Just think about how most nomad people welcome visitors – those that come in peace, of course.

So how come there are so many ‘scientists’ are ready to counter, entirely, something as wide as ‘religion’?

Faith versus Fact, Jerry Coyne

Can Religion and Science coexist? Jeffery Tayler