There are two aspects to religion: faith and affiliation.
Faith is the aspect that has to do with the tomes of literature owing to the perpetually fecund imagination of people throughout the history of mankind. It is fun, like it is when a million fans filled with Pottermania cast spells on each other and go back home tired. It provokes our imagination, like the Harry Potter series did with the fanfiction world woven all over it. It provides scope for interpretation, like the debate about whether Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore is a homosexual or not. And it gives food for thought, like about the place and purpose and justification of the Dark Arts. People can keep or lose faith, be faithful or faithless, be unfaithful or marry multiple faiths.
Affiliation is the aspect that has to do with the thriving economies built around religion. It creates the rituals that come and go out of fashion. It deploys brand ambassadors to convert easy prey through fear and freebies. It tracks its growth rates (and methinks thus its desperate orthodox wings are against abortion and family planning). It declares tolerance and pockets of it persecute non-followers. It is the ugly gigantic monster.
Besides the benefits of livelihood to a few that these affiliations create and more importantly the problems they perpetrate, the most unethical and unfortunate cause of their growth is birth. You may not know whether a foetus is that of a boy or a girl, whether it has all its sensory organs functioning or not, whether it will survive to come out or not, but there is little doubt as to what religion it is affiliated with, and that blind certainty makes me sad.
As a human right, secular governments and religious states alike proclaim the grant of freedom of religion and the tolerance of non-followers, but the freedom is of faith and the tolerance (which itself is self-flattering) is of affiliation. Officially changing from one religion to another is possible. None of this is enough. What I hope is for people to have freedom in a greater sense. Freedom from religions, from affiliations. I couldn’t figure out whether that is even possible where I live, but I think it should be and should be easier.
Can a newborn not grow up without being affiliated to any religion, consider various choices and their varieties in the market and pick one if it so wishes to? Will it make a difference?
Online social networks allow the options “spiritual but not religious” and “atheist”. Imagine an official census body allowing this option and making it effortless. To adults. All religions will lose a small portion of their population. Now imagine the body resetting the religion entry to null, and asking people to voluntarily come forward and have that entry updated with their choice if they wish to. Then?
Then, people will not only have a freedom of religion, but also exercise it. Affiliation to a religion becomes truly a choice. A voluntary affiliation is a closer indicator of practice and adherence, is more than a vestige. I resist my temptation to speculate how the statistics will then look like. Today people belong to the religion they belong to mostly because they were born with it, not because they chose it.
[This, of course, is true about other social requirements like citizenship and caste as well.]