> It looks weak when it goes up against answersingenesis.org, and a rabidly (maybe not literally, yet, but give it time...) culture of opposition to basic science, such as vaccination, among many evangelicals.

But that's a problem with American evangelicals, not religion as a whole. The earliest universities were sponsored by the church; and the works of ancient scholars were preserved by Catholics and Muslims.

> Ultimately the claims of religion are moral, and they're on very thin ice when religion has such an appalling history of support for slavery, torture, murder, exploitation, grift, war, paedophilia, and biblical literalism.

Sure, but religion also has a long history of fighting against those claims; a lot of slaves adopted Christianity, and used it as a tool to fight against oppression. It was also a large part of the civil rights movement; Martin Luther King Jr was a Baptist Minister, and Malcolm X was a Muslim.

> and an apparently endless series of scandals and court cases featuring youth pastors and grifting megachurch multimillionaires.

Plenty of grift among the sciences too. Look at the replication crisis, or companies like Theranos and FTX. In the United States, medical malpractice is the third leading cause of death.

> Personally I'd rather not be in any community that trades comfort for complicity and/or denial, no matter how nice its social events feel.

You should probably stay off Hacker News then. For example, plenty of people here celebrate electrification, even though the raw materials needed for that are mined by children and slaves.

> But you're far more likely to see atheists trying to progress public ethics than religious believers, especially in the US.

I'm curious, do you have any examples?