I great difficulty having any respect for a religion that has so little confidence in the truth of its beliefs that it feels reduced to using threats in order to propagate those beliefs.

Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant.

Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false.

What you cannot have is a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes. What you can have is a gene that makes organisms sacrifice themselves for other organisms under the influence of selfish genes.

My computer is a very complex gadget and it was designed by many designers, so why must the universe have only a single designer and not many designers?

You are born into a dangerous world, there are all sorts of ways in which you could die, and you need to believe your parents when they tell you don't go near the edge of the cliff, or don't pick up that snake, etc. There could very well be a Darwinian survival value in that sort of brain rule of thumb. And a by-product of that could be that you believe your parents when they tell you about the juju in the sky, or whatever it might be.

It's very important to try to inculcate into children moral rules, such as "do as you would be done by."