edit: Forgot to mention that, sometime these are the people who govern us, make law, treat us and in process of doing these things they try to enforce their belief OR have strong opposition towards anything which contradicts their belief.
You're still going to run into problems applying and adjective to people, since they can think scientifically in one area and unscientifically in another.
For example, Dawkins, presumably thinks scientifically in genetics. However, when it comes to religion being a cause of wars and other violence versus a pretense for wars and violence, Dawkins hangs onto the "cause" hypothesis despite data pointing to the "pretense" hypothesis.
The difference is important. If you get rid of a cause, you solve the problem. If you get rid of a pretense, people find another pretense. Robert Pape's data is consistent with the pretense hypothesis. Nonetheless, Dawkins devotes himself wholeheartedly to propagating the cause hypothesis. If he took a scientific approach, he would devote himself wholeheartedly to testing his hypothesis instead.
It's Dawkins "who doesn't see presented/available evidence and just think that no matter what, their beliefs are true."
Even if it is not the root cause for wars (which I can't comment on), I suspect it still enables wars, for example by paying soldiers with empty promises. Therefore I personally would have to agree with Dawkins.
My suspicion is that if religion were eradicated, people who want to compel others to do war or terrorism would quickly find other pretenses and other empty promises. This suspicion is consistent with Robert Pape's finding controlling variables for increasing/decreasing terrorism that are not connected to religiosity.
Of course it is possible to not question things and not be religious, which might explain the terrorism study. Also, of course there are sometimes valid reasons for wars, and clearly not all wars have anything to do with religion at all.
So maybe I am not campaigning against religion so much as for logic and rational thought. Religion just happens to be in the way.
I mean at least if said humans don't reflect on what they are doing. If they have come rationally to the conclusion that some action is the best, sure, go for it. But religion puts some authorities in charge of programming other people.
For instance, why not just drug everyone and make them docile slaves? I am sure such a society would function very well, so why not do it?
Nature of course doesn't care - a society running on religion is just another ant colony (mindless agents acting out a system). Maybe the system prevails, maybe it doesn't.
The harm I see is that religion prevents adaption and evaluation of new strategies, which might lead to peril in a lot of circumstances.
Lots of scientists go to their graves defending pet theories in spite of lots of available evidence to the contrary.
This behavior has more to do with how much of the ego is invested in something than the ability to see or evaluate evidence as such.
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that happened in politics or religion."
But here is another quote to illustrate the counterpart:
"Die Wahrheit triumphiert nie, ihre Gegner sterben nur aus."
Rough translation: The truth never triumphs, its opponents simply die out.
That's by Max Planck.
There was a paper a while back focusing on abortion, which combined a bunch of statistics on who got them and what their political views were - the conclusion being that in the US, the Democratic party's ranks had been reduced as a result of their support for the policy.
The flip side for religious groups (who are generally anti-abortion) could easily be true.
Anyway, what with HN and humor it is probably good that this has been flagged off the homepage, but you may very well be right.
The religions we observe today are the result of - heavy irony here - an evolutionary struggle to survive, and simply because of that the religions that remain are pretty good at what they do, to spread and to remain. An atheist movement capable of competing with religion on sheer numbers alone would probably have to borrow bits and pieces from those very same religions in order to be successful in that competition.