" ... an overwhelming sense of how much of the world and the people in it are ruled ummm... influenced... by ignorance and superstition"

But it's not just in the field of religion that people are ignorant and superstitious. I used to work in the soaps and detergents industry. In that field, people - especially people who worked in marketing - believed all sorts of weird things, for which there was no evidence. For example they thought that normal skin needs moisture - when in fact it has been 'designed' by millions of years of evolution to regulate its own moisture content. They believed that you could moisturise skin via soaps and surfactant based shower products - when all the evidence suggests that they (temporarily) dry the skin. They believed that the body and skin are contaminated by man-made 'toxins' and 'impurities' which can be removed by washing with simple soaps and surfactant-based products. They believed that normal skin needs 'soothing' - when in fact only damaged skin needs soothing - and products which do so are medicines, not cleansers. They believed that 'natural' ingredients are better and 'purer' than synthetic ones - when, in fact, natural ingredients are often complex mixtures and cannot be described as 'pure'. And so on, and so on. They not only subsribed to these beliefs in order to sell products but I came to realise that they really believed that they were true.

Of course our glorious leaders also subscribe to such nonsensical belief systems. For example the myth of the 'Free Market' and its 'self-regulation'; absurd beliefs for which we are all going to suffer.