I'm saying that they're both ways of negotiating a problem, though the problems and practices of both are obviously totally incomparable. Having had my experiences with both, indirect and direct (I am a very conservative preacher's granddaughter, you know, and the great-granddaughter of a Catholic nun), I'd still rather take "we're sinners all--be good and you'll be taken care of eventually" than "you're fucked up, have some pills"--as the default approach. But if it were up to me, we'd start treating these things as complementary, rather than fundamentally opposed. Some people need pills/talk therapy, and some people need to wear out their knees on flagstones and build their shrines, light their candles, chant their prayers. They're rituals that function in different ways. Some people are missing a fundamental neurotransmitter, and some people are missing feeling small. I wouldn't destroy either, because, you know... different people need different things to lead a fulfilling life.
And I'm not trying to say that one
is better than the other. I'm saying that we treat religion the way we do due to our positioning in modernity, and that I
do think we are developing a dogmatic approach to science, the provable as the real. The way these things are taught have their similarities, and the way the uneducated and unthoughtful approach them and the things they say is very, very similar.
People who don't want to think aren't going to magically start thinking just because they're using scientific reasoning they don't understand instead of the religious version.
They also used to burn people at the stake for being odd or perform exorcisms (tied to a bed, starved and verbally abused.).
Read about the eugenics programs set up in the US in the name of good science and a healthy population? Inpatients were given live tuberculosis strains to check their evolutionary fitness as they entered mental hospitals. Oh, and there's all the stuff about forced sterilization and, though I shouldn't bring this up again, the US-invented gas chamber intended to kill off the aforementioned odd folks en mass.
People do a lot of stupid shit because they want to, and they'll grab any reason they can to justify it. It's not the reason's fault for being ready to hand.