Chicken and egg paradox, lol. Thing is, to even begin to question/study the phenominon, science is the answer. Religion's answer 'god did it' does not even begin to cover any ground at all.
Furthermore, in society we take the following stance with theories: denied until proven, I say again, proven true. That does not work the other way around.
Here's a working example:
I come home from work to find my family have disappeared and I believe it to be the work of aliens. I then write a book without any documented proof at all of said aliens and two thousand years later, half the planet is at war with each other over which alien is better and how our lives/lifestyles apparrently matter to the beings that were never proved to even exist.
Of course that wouldn't happen as today, we are lucky enough to be able to think much more freely and I would just be called a madman and put in a padded room somewhere. Christianity, Judaism, Islam etc etc should not get a free ride in this matter, but they do, on the basis that they've always been here. To Americans who fought in the civil war, slavery had always been there.
Religion is not as benevolent as it is preached to be, certainly not christianity at least. Some of the most oppressed people in the world are deeply religious per head (see uganda, serbia, etc etc) as religion always has been a method of controlling the masses, a cynic like me would say that is what caused it to be in the first place, but we can take from the pagans who built stonehenge that worship was taking place before such a tool was needed. On the other hand, some of the happiest nations in the 1st world, Finland for example have very little if any worship in their communities.
And of course, it is the last refuge of socially acceptable prejudice. A priest can condemn a gay man or woman for being who they are and if made public, debate ensues. If a random member of the public did so, it would be a hate crime.
In short, religion to me symbolises everything that is wrong with the world today and as a society we are smart enough by now to have our own morality to not need guidance from a 2000 year old story book, much less one that has caused more human deaths than any other cause in human history. I don't just mean the bible, I mean all religious text. Religion always has had an agenda of its own, it always will and the sooner we all open our eyes and drop it, the sooner we can progress as a society. Scientifically, we are nigh on 1000 years behind our potential purely for this reason.
/rant
