Was religion ever anything much better than a dragon feeding on its own tail?

In answering "probably not" to the title question, I don't want to downplay the genius that has gone into architecture, music and other arts that have had such cultural influence throughout the ages. Religion, of course, has been historically where much of the opportunity, time and money was on offer for the creative person. Like the (fictional) Syai, we, in the present day world with its pressing socio-political and material problems, need to grow out of religion per se, while we retain and continue with the arts, symbols and stories. These include works that can delight and teach us something, despite that it was normal in the past for their creators and communicators to make serious reference to superstition-promoting, supernatural pronouncements, images and myths masquerading as "Truths".

No devised system can self-asses its aptness for what is is designed to do in action and/ or persuasion. 

(Natural systems, such as the ecological, are naturally excluded, here) That is the Archilles heel of religion, but not only religion. It is also why we cannot dismiss the reality of the mind or mindfulness ( See, previous blog). The "axiom" of reality above explodes all religious claims to truth-absolutism, but also the scientific claim that reality is best understood by materialistic behaviourist determinism. Our mind - our capacity to observe and think rationally - is either "talking" to the real world or it is "talking" to itself in a manner lacking a faith-to-fact basis in the real world.

My blogs have already dealt with the ideology fanatic. Despite that, my feeling here is that the comparative sanity of a pragmatic person's "matter-of-fact"-ness   and acceptance of things as they are (as if they could never have come-to-be or needed-to-be otherwise) is not good enough. Awakening to reality requires imagination; and one of the underlying purposes of this blog-site is to try to support the imaginative envisioning of possible positive progress for our species on this planet.