Here's a data point for you regarding Christianity (coming from someone who is not particularly spiritual at all full disclosure)
For a while before the first crusade, the church gained a huge amount of popular support and devotion when it managed to enact the Truce of God which basically forbade the constantly feuding warrior elite class, the knights, from pillaging on a few days of the week. It was mostly done as a way to give the peasantry a chance to actually do some agriculture amidst all the pummeling, but the peasantry understandably saw the church as an institution that acted in their interest. Fast forward to the first crusade, and there was almost a mass hysteria event as people, whose only chances at comfort for their whole lives had pretty much been downstream of the church, believed Pope Urban's propaganda about the Turks wholeheartedly.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that while I don't subscribe to the idea that religions are some kind of evil anti-intellectual force to be eradicated, their becoming the providers of people's material needs represents a failure of some kind. The hierarchical structure of the average major religion just lends itself too easily to exploitation imo.
I KNOW MORE ABOUT HAGFISH THAN ANYONE IN THIS THREAD