Yep, that about sums it up.

Humans dont want to face that religion is an artificial construct. It is a side effect or missfire due to our evolutionary disire for "safty in numbers". You create a club and that club supports itself insuring a greater chance of survival. The superstitious aspect of it is our ego projecting human qualities on a fictional super hero we wish would protect us(as a species), even though no such thing exists.

Religion spreads just like marketing Coke and Pepsi. One product comes out, another company looks at it and trys to mimic it and market it's own version. "Imam is the same as messiah is the same as savior". It is "the one" who will swoop down to save the chosen people.

Do you mean LaVey's Satanism?  Or the people who are Christian, but root for the villain?

Scott Atran's book "Darwin's God" accounts for solitary theists, non-anthropomorphic theists and pantheists by explaining the evolution of religion in terms that don't include references to safety in numbers.  Atran explains the evolution of supernatural/religious belief tendencies as a side-effect of features of intelligence that evolved for unrelated, adaptive reasons.  Religion itself is not necessarily adaptive. 

I'm not an atheist, but let me give it a shot. First atheism includes a range of ideas. Included among those is that the very concept of god is invalid. There is no coherent definition for 'god'. This form of atheism isn't a belief that god does not exist but rather a belief that there is not even a valid god concept and you can't even discuss the existence of something until you have a valid concept.

You keep saying "you atheists." You said you don't believe in a god, so what is your position? 

Well written.  The only problem is that toothpaste actually is beneficial unlike religion.  Perhaps something like soda would be a better analogy. 

sarcasm.   

All religions are not the same. This is evident by the outer forms. Some require animal sacrifice, some human sacrifice, others no sacrifice.

Religions have many differing outer forms.

Some require submission to a greater being. Others require submission to a way of life. Others require inquiry.

Religions differ greatly.

Unfortunetely, western religions have been so diluted over the last 400-500 years they have lost their power and are mere shells.

For a truly religious life, few beliefs are required, but much trust, great effort, and great pain and suffering.

Pain and suffering?

Well going to church on sunday and singing a few hymns are not suffering. Well maybe they are but not in the traditional sense of real suffering.

Suffering is a necessary part of the religious experience.

Forget about the 3 western religions, christianity, judaism, islam.

Instead look at the aboriginal and tribal religions. Frequently called "Nature Religions".

The religion of the American Indians, Australian Aborigines, etc.

These primitive religions give us a flavour of the true religions of man and the part they play in his life.

Ss'Karfjjl created you, and controls your existence. Ss'Karfjjl demands that you spend your life savings on oatmeal and raisin cookies, then rob a bank, then spend your spoils on Stewie Griffin t-shirts and cans of Mountain Dew.

If you do not do things by sundown tomorrow, Ss'Karfjjl will banish you to Trrrk'Yyar, where you will wallow in vomit and drink cobra saliva for all eternity.

By your rational, you cannot 'knock' the ludicrous claims I just made. You have no idea who or what Ss'Karfjjl or Trrrk'Yyar could be (or, likely, how to even pronounce them 'correctly&#39, so is it reasonable that I demand you somehow define those things before you can dismiss them? I mean, arguably, you could try to define them, but you'd never be correct in your definition (because, well, there isn't a correct defintion for either absurd entity). So, no - it's not reasonable.

On that same token, it's unreasonable to ask me to define 'God', a fantastical deity that literally has no definition.

I have a perfectly good 'idea' of what I'm denying myself here. Absolutely nothing.

I would say that the analogy can be taken even a step farther:

While the marketing staff of the companies behind the toothpaste products try to get people to believe that their particular brand is the best and all others fall short, most of the consumers don't actually believe it. Most of the consumers of toothpaste use the same toothpaste that they did when they were growing up. And indeed, most of the consumers don't care what toothpaste other consumers use, but would be very disturbed to find out that their neighbor doesn't brush his teeth at all.