What's good and what's bad about religion.

The illustration is a rough impression of a Syai  temple-theatre.  The material world is the lower hemisphere, the spiritual is the invisible upper. On the far side is a stage and open-air tiered seating for 'sacred' dramas. Titans, gods and spirits perform on the flat roof, sometimes descending to the stage.

A human-like culture of a planet like Earth would hardly have a religion very similar to our main ones. (Read  'The Sparrow' and  'Children of God'.)  Giordano Bruno was executed for saying something similar. The Syai religion is really a mythological story performing the task of teaching basic ethics and psychological understandings. The object of the story is to guide us along the survival-path of empathy, conflict-solving and co-operation despite differences; but also to raise awareness of the potency of the dark side of our natures. The myth with its mysterious 'Prime Mover', its power-hungry egotistical titans and the creative, struggling gods that revolted against them - in the final analysis - is simply a 'picturing' of  archetypal personifications that in the end reside in our individual psyches.

No Syai person would fall to believing that these spirit-entities and the sacred mountain with its surrounding four spirit-lands are 'real'. Nevertheless the story has power just because it is not a stagnated faith in some past revelation by a pretender to a direct line to God. The painful past can be moved by spirit-mind into a better present, and that betterment can be maintained, improved upon with universal enhancement of our lives despite universal mortality. Suffering need not be so exaggerated as we find it in a world like ours. So it is that what's right about Religion is so well summed up in this paragraph written by Anthony de Mello:

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue, about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is just a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.