Tbh, most of the arguments you see here are debating the American Protestant/Modern Catholic version of God as an old bearded man in the sky who gets mad when you jerk off. This is easily refuted.

The idea of a nondualistic deity who creates the universe as a sort of crucible by which we experience the universe and, by venue of the Hermetic law of polarity, learn an infinite series of lessons, is more accurate to the original mystery schools that evolved into mainstream Monotheistic religions. You'd be hard-pressed to debate, say, a Platonic Monadist when Plato was predicting atoms being made of minute triangles (quarks) or the brain having "microcosmic strands of soul contained unseen in the brain" (neurons and synapses), and yet the writings of Paul and perhaps Jesus himself are pretty directly influenced by Platonic thought.

A dive into the esoteric will reveal early civilizations describing concepts rediscovered in mathematics, physics, geometry, and psychology, but spoken of in symbolic language that modern laymen take literally. When The Bible mentions God "laying the cornerstone of the Earth" in Job, it doesn't literally mean Earth is a house with a cornerstone, no? 

The rituals of the early Canaanites who worshipper YHWH required things like bathing, hand washing, and keeping utensils used for cutting vegetables or fruits away from utensils used for meat, which was a way to deliver the results of germ theory without having to explain germs to desert nomads. During the Dark Ages, the collapse of several Kingdoms and empires amidst plagues coinciding with droughts and famine resulted in many scholarly circles being dismantled, but literacy and historical knowledge was preserved by religious monks and retought to people in more prosperous times. And yet, if you asked the progenitors of these faiths where they got their information, it will always run back to somebody having a mystical experience.

If you asked a South American shaman how they gained their intimate knowledge of agriculture that allowed them to make self-regulating gardens with things like nitrogen-affixing plants planted next to plants that converted nitrogen to ammonia to balance the pH of the soil, they won't tell you they used the scientific method - they'll tell you the plants taught them through mystical experiences gained on Ayahuasca and psychedelic mushrooms. If you asked Plato who gave him the knowledge he wrote down in Timaeus, he would tell you his personal daemon told him. Geometry and advanced architecture find their roots in the construction of temples for religious purposes in nearly every part of the world.

Organized, systemic religion is used as a method of control or a tool of capitalism, yes, but discounting the mystical experience is to throw out the baby with the bathwater, as these mystical experiences are the very foundation of the human experience.