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To me, religion has two basic aspects:
1) It provides a means of power and control for those who lead the religion.
2) It provides a common code of behaviour that people can agree to follow, and a reason to follow it.
I'll also make one generalization about religion:
Show me someone who claims to follow their religion and I'll show you a hypocrite.
In other words, religion serves a purpose, but in the end it's all about what we want people to do, not a deity.
We can't help ourselves. Even if a deity showed up in person, gave incontrovertible prove of it's power, and gave us a set of laws, we'd add to it, imbellish it, and say that people who don't go above and beyond those laws aren't pious enough. Then we'd have splinter groups whose extensions are different from other groups. Finally, clerics of some of these groups will use their positions of influence to accomplish their own personal goals.
What ever happened to those 10 commandments? Got a little complicated since then.
Now this is not applicable to all religions, but it does cover the largest and most influential of the worlds religions. That's how they got that way.
To me religions should be viewed as a philosophy of life and no more.
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