You don't know who you're talking about.

I've known & continue to know many religious people, a lot of whom are close friends, family members & neighbours. I don't avoid them, much less discriminate against them, and well I know (and understand) the nature of their thinking and faith as well as their points of personal 'crisis' when things don't quite match up, for whatever reason. People are people - the difference being that the religious (by definition) exhibit a willingness to accept a point of potentially divisive superstitious subjectivism over one of a more inclusive objectivism.

I've experienced many examples - from the proselyting antics of the Christian Union which once reduced a very dear friend of mine to a nervous breakdown during her time at university, or the Buddhist bus driver who would leave old people running in the rain on account of Karma. As we travel around the country bringing our music to select discriminating minorities, I routinely throw Gideon Bibles out of Travelodge windows (rock 'n' roll!) in dread of the more pernicious missionary attitudes engendered by religion amongst those who feel their way is the only way. I've seen lives & families torn apart by the Moonies, and I've seen Mormon missionaries reducing once vibrant elderly neighbours to despairing shadows of themselves. I've seen real tragedy in the name of Religion - and I've seen lives as casualties barely recovered having been raised in the darkness of Roman Catholicism or the Jehovah's Witnesses.

This is no mere stereotyping I can assure you. To this day I know Christians who feel discriminated against by science and secularism and yet openly pledge allegiance to questionable political doctrines in order to preserve what they perceive (without question) to be 'their culture' - just I know Catholics who look upon their faith as another person might their ethnicity and so regard any criticism of their faith as being inherently racist. Whatever you say about 'questioning', the core shibboleths of religion remain inescapable, so much to the point that (as I said in another thread) I'm wary when I meet a professed Christian of any persuasion who isn't a right wing, homophobic material ID creationist for whom dinosaur bones and the light of distant galaxies is paving the way for God's ultimate judgement of humanity. When I meet Christians who claim to be so enlightened, I ask them so what's the point? The Mythos of Religion depends on literalism, absolutism, funny hats, heresy and hoo-hah, however so personal the experience of that might be; hell, even I might be moved to tears by the mythic archetypes on offer at the various Masses of the Easter Triduum, but no more than by (say) Cheyenne's death in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Spirituality is common to us all - without exception; it is the human mulch out which Religion has been engineered to exploit some very basic issues & concerns of existence and turn them very much against ourselves by seeding the notion that they are somehow True. What is truth? Even Christ couldn't answer that one.