"If religion was purged of dogma, superstition and impossible literalism, and then found its feet planted in truly humanistic acts of love and fellowship, compassion and deeds, while expressing its esoteric and abstract concepts with lots of wriggle room it would be palatable to so many more people."
If I understood you correctly in the past you basically said that to survive religion needs to reinvent itself. If it did as you suggest, I'm not sure that it would be called religion but rather it might be called humanism. In any case, whatever it would be called it would probably be more palatable to me.
"If religion alined with science and proved itself by deeds few would ever doubt or challenge its claims."
If religion aligned with science then I suspect it would be just called science. However, if the focus of religion were to centre on love, compassion, empathy, altruism, tolerance, cooperation, generosity and other attributes that most of is know to be central to our well being then I doubt that we would see the level of intensity of challenges that we see today.
Instead we see so many religions advocating the continuous stroking of a Creator in order to receive salvation. Depicting the supposed Creator of the universe with such a puerile ego is, I suspect, an insult to the Creator.
My wife once mentioned to a Jewish friend that she was angry with God. Her friend replied: that's a very Jewish thing to do. I suspect that Jews have a much closer relationship with God than many Christians do - if God exists of course.
Science has its restrictions because it can deal only with physical reality, we are an aspect of physical reality so it deals with us. If spiritual reality exists then our only way to influence our position in spiritual reality is to live as rightly and educate ourselves as appropriately as we can in physical reality. The future will take care of itself if we live correctly in the present.
If a spiritual reality exists and is meaningful then I suspect that we should be able to detect it in the same sense that we detect the existence of the invisible such as electrons, neutrons, photos, neutrinos, and numerous subatomic particles through the way that they interact with the observable universe.
