OBJECTIVE FACT Fun fact: God doesn't exist

That's a nice quippy response, but I don't believe God exists, and I don't just pick and choose what my factual beliefs are.

This but unironically because you can see how many atheists embrace the "we live in a simulation" thing.

whats the point then

I am yet to see a convincing argument that they exist in the same niches and as such are competing with one another for existence.

The more we understand the universe, the less there is space for God in it. The vehement opposition of christcucks to evolution is just the most prominent example of it: sure, they can (and some do) say that OK, sure, God just set up the world to eventually produce Man, and also God is about morality, not about cells reproducing and shit, and so on, but the ones that oppose it correctly recognize that as a cope, as one heck of a retreat. But that's just the most prominent example, all scientific explanations literally erase the magic inherent in whatever is being explained. An ancient man felt gratitude to God for the Sun being warm and bright, the modern man is, like, that's just hydrogen fusing into helium, with roughly the same power output per volume as a compost heap, meh.

See also this satire of the cope (in a fictional universe where Christianity is actually true):

Stephen Jay Gould, a biologist working at Harvard University, tried to stabilize the burgeoning philosophical disaster with his theory of “non-overlapping magisteria”. He said that while religion might have access to certain factual truths, like that angels existed or that the souls of the darned spent eternity writhing in a land of fire thousands of miles beneath the Earth, it was powerless to discuss human values and age-old questions like “what is the Good?” or “what is the purpose of my existence?” Atheistic science should be thought of not as a literal attempt to say things like “space is infinite and full of stars” or “humankind evolved from apes” that were now known to be untrue, but as an attempt to record, in the form of stories, our ancestors' answers to those great questions. When a scientist says “space is infinite and full of stars”, she does not literally mean that the crystal sphere surrounding the Earth doesn't exist. She is metaphorically referring to the infinitude of the human spirit, the limitless possibilities it offers, and the brightness and enlightenment waiting to be discovered. Or when a scientist says “humankind evolved from apes”, she is not literally doubting the word of the archangel Uriel that humankind was created ex nihilo on October 13, 3761 BC and evolution added only as part of a later retconning – she is saying that humankind has an animal nature that it has barely transcended and to which it is always at risk of returning. When religious people mocked atheists for supposedly getting their cosmology wrong, they were missing the true grandeur and beauty of atheism, a grandeur which had been passed on undiminished from Democritus to the present day and connected us to the great thinkers of times past.

See also this as the ultimate seethe at the end of rejection of the religious cope (take care though, it's one of the scariest things I've ever read): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sYgv4eYH82JEsTD34/beyond-the-reach-of-god . This is how a universe that has no place for God whatsoever looks like. We are heading that way.

I think I misunderstood your question. I answered "why isn't religion being embraced today" which is simple, it's been outcompeted, as Marx predicted.

You asked "why shouldn't religion be believed/embraced today". Is that a fair interpretation of what you want to discuss?

If so, I think your argument that it improves population fitness or welfare (or whatever metric you want to use) is a poor argument. The germane question is whether you can prove Religion, and that answer is no.

Proof?

this gets a lot less mysterious when you consider how many religions there have been

it's not that the one widely believed happened to map well to humanity's well-being, it's that the one that mapped well to humanity's well-being spread more than the ones that didn't

for every christianity there are 2000 "dead animals you find in the woods are a blessing from god" religions that got obliterated because they ate dead animals in the woods and died, or "mutilate your genitals in these seven specific ways' that sucked to be part of and no one would join.

But is Christianity the only religion that helps people and creates good societies? And micro societies with different cowtools spring up and die all the time- is it surprising that the cowtools that create the most successful societies would naturally tend to win out in the long term?