Jehalopeno, I understand your experience after leaving the JWorg, going from a polarized position to a more moderate appraisal of religion and religious people. I imagine that your experience, which was like mine, is the norm. I still loathe the JW religion and rue the wasted time spent with it.
I like too that you brought in the historical matter of John Lock whose informed and modest aims were to clear the philosophical ground so that others could cultivate it. Along with David Hume, Diderot and The Encyclopaedists and the agency of the White House under Jefferson who cribbed much of Lock’s work, much philosophical progress was made and the Enlightenment began to have an impact. Just as the Renaissance and the Reformation had revised the world views of the West, the Enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth century began to end abject servility to the principle of monarchy as well as constraining aristocratic and religious privilege. It is Humanists today who are still pressing on under the Enlightenment banner.
Therefore ideas; accurate and evidence based mental concepts of the tangible world, matter very much as do understanding the zeitgeist in which ideas are shaped.
My point is that to make progress, humanity must keep changing for the better. By dragging forward the old irrational belief of unknowable, invisible gods into the modern world, it diminishes the effectiveness of societies’ aims for advancement into areas such as rational education, peace-making and realization of human potential. So there are grave errors in perpetuating long sanctioned religious myths about being answerable to gods when no such things can have any logical validity.
Religion is retrograde, religion is a faulty life raft; it should not be banned but exposed to reason and left to die a quiet death.