Nah, religion is just repackaged tribalism. Not like we wouldn't replace it with something equally stupid, like rioting and fighting each other over politics... At least religion includes a sort of morality as part of the deal.
The 'pagan' Romans were astounded at the intolerance and dogma of the Christians. They were used to absorbing other ethnicities pantheons into their own. While they had all sorts of chauvinistic and tribalistic beliefs, they never believed -- until Christianity -- that they had the answers for all human kind.
Christianity is the origin of 'religion' as we think of it now. It has altered the lens of how we perceive all belief systems, so we accept as normal the concept of an all-encompassing totalizing system of transcendent explanation.
Whether you think its explanations are right or not, this is a unique property historically. And Islam inherited this philosophy.
Even more profound is the extreme intolerance that Christianity fostered _within itself_. Many thousands lost their _lives_ for interpreting the some aspect the Trinity, or the relationship of the Father to the Son differently from what became accepted as official dogma. Very technical language and very specific interpretations of this language controlled the fate of nations and the lives of millions.
No, it's not. Religious identity may be a focus of tribalism, but religion is more than identity.
> Not like we wouldn't replace it with something equally stupid, like rioting and fighting each other over politics... At least religion includes a sort of morality as part of the deal.
So does politics; every political ideology, like every religious ideology, is exactly a "sort of morality". Actually, there's often a content overlap between political and religious ideologies (and often a political ideology subsumes an expressly religious one, or vice versa.)
Disregarding facts is and should considered to be immoral.
But you can very well have "good intentions" while doing so.
Of course, followers of different sorts of morality often view it as immoral; that's inherent in conflict between moral systems.
When you're righting over religion, people are very reluctant to convert (which is usually a sin), and to accept the converted, so it ends with cleansings and genocide. Same thing with ethnic conflicts, but they're religion-driven more often than not.
If those two things aren't identical, then you have two or more different substantove belief systems that happen tobshare a common label; it's inaccurate to judge everything going under the label by either the founding philosophy or any of the later incarnations; they are separate things that must be judged separately.
We assume that we should stick with that Jesus considered right. But we can't ask him, so we have to interpret whatever sacred texts available. We assume that only one interpretation is correct and all other are sinfully wrong.
This is a fertile ground for conflict. Everyone has their own interpretation but pretends that they all share it. Ultimately it's the Highlander, when just one Christian is to stay alive over dogma.
This is actually stricter than Islam where conflicts over interpretation are explicitly discouraged, and indeed there's less of those. However Islam is even less tolerant to "live and let live".
The solution, IMO, is stop considering one person "the one", and get rid of sacred texts.
Heck, getting back to the topic, even in Jesus' time there were various messianic and mystery cults within Judaism. Christianity just won... But even then there were all sorts of crazy beliefs, like that of reincarnation, which was surprisingly popular in the ancient Christian (pre-Nicene) world...