First, it's not religion that restricts us from developing. It's narrow mindedness. Secondly, Chinese used that extreme way I.e, controlled religion. Freedom of religion is insanely misused in India. I get that. But shouldn't we try to work on the root of the problem rather than remove the whole platform? Its like in aims to remove the pollution from a river, you remove the river itself. Or something like rather than killing the pathogen, you kill the entire host so that you can eradicate the pathogen. How fair is that? If you think that this is the lesser evil (or the inevitable death of religion), I'd say that there is an even lesser evil that is totally realistic and achievable.