Interesting. I've been raised a Muslim in a predominantly Muslim country, and I agree with most of what you're saying..
>Education in general strengthens my resolve that my religion is largely ascientific (not non-scientific, but rather outside the realm of applicability for scientific investigation).
Yes. There's a distinction that I've found not many people make. The prefix "a" doesn't seem to be easily grasped, it seems. I know it's semantics, but it changes the meaning.
Immoral and amoral aren't the same. Some people also confuse atheism and agnosticism.
And what you're saying makes sense: Since you can't prove either the existence or lack thereof, it is silly to mock those who believe (what many atheists do) or those who don't (what many theists do).
I won't say I'm a religiously observant person (lifestyle), but I'm not insensible to religion.
I think Prophets lived in a time where it wasn't enough to make a sex-tape to get that kind of following: They had a product people wanted really badly.
What product can brag of being thousands of years old and still affecting billions of peoples after the founder and most original staff are gone.
Furthermore, I'm interested in religions' shared values: If you Venn diagram religions' values, you'll end up with "Being a decent human being".
To my knowledge, no religion preaches killing, stealing, cheating, etc.
Religions I know of actually elevate the value of work (and perfecting what you do), to being clean and taking care of yourself, to such a high place as to be equivalent to prayer (Islam, and also Judaism if I recall correctly).
Again, I find it amusing when supposedly "logical" people scoff at those who are religious as being "illogical": How logical can you be if you're using Hungarian notation.
How "scientific" can someone who claims to be, be, when they assert that God doesn't exist simply because there's no proof (anyone who follows even a mildly scientific method (if one can) knows that the lack of proof of the existence of something isn't a proof of its non existence.. Implication being abused, black swans, etc).
And vice-versa: You can't accuse someone of being illogical if they don't "believe" in something they can't prove. If it were proved (either exists or not), it wouln't be called "believe", but "know".
I also think that if you plot intelligence versus theism, you get a Gaussian distribution: Extremes represent hard-core atheists and hard-core religious people, who use the same stuff (mocking and ridiculing) the "others".
I stick to being good. Leaving people better than we met them. Sleeping better than we woke up.
Anyway, back to coding.. and making better code than I made yesterday.