This kind of thinking has led to murders of whole families. True, the perpetrators were already unbalanced in one way or another, but more than one family murderer has said it was the only way to get them into heaven. I have heard of at least two JW family murderers who said they did it to make sure their family would get into the New World.
Religion is indeed the opiate of the people. But it's worse than that. I would call it a festering cancer on the face of humanity. The worse atrocities in human history were usually "justified," if not directly caused, by differing religious beliefs.
Steven Weinberg, an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics, said: "Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."
That's exactly the way I feel about it.