My computer crashed whilst I was replying so I'll try and rewrite most of it.
A serious question: have you ever actually been part of a religious community? Because with all due respect, just like
@driftawaay, you are writing things that you would know are wrong if you had ever actually been in a religious community. There is a massive difference between having faith in a set a values and a higher being, and having faith that a certain scripture is the literal word of God. Modern progressive religious communities that in your words "Cherry-pick" are not "cheating", nor are they some inferior form of religion. They are simply using the brains, realising that some 2000 year old traditions contradict modern values since we know better now, and disregard some of those traditions as a consequence. They are still very much religious, the difference is that they have adapted with the times, something that major religions have done many times throughout history. Faith is not a black and white thing - you can have faith whilst not believing the word of your scripture literally.
Similarly, modern religious progressives do are more than capable of thinking rationally and indeed many excellent scientists and engineers are religious - because they are able to realise that there are certain questions that science can answer, and certain questions that religion can provide a more satisfactory answer to. There isn't any contradiction here. Religion is not the abolishment of all reason and common sense, that is an incredibly simplistic and wrong view of religion.
The reason why it's wrong to simply address abrahamic religion is because you can't make grand sweeping statements about religion as a whole simply by talking about a few types. Even if the majority were exploiting it for negative reasons (which isn't true), the simple fact that some people can make a lot of good of it shows that it's not fundamentally bad. I don't see why this is so difficult to understand.
No, it doesn't. If you actually went into my local synagogue, for instance, you'd see many sessions where people examine their scriptures very critically and evaluate it with respect to their lives and things that are going on in the world. If you like, you can view that as literature analysis - and it is extremely meaningful to these people. There are some extremely intelligent people in the field of theology. And as I've already stated, simply having faith is not the same thing as the abandonment of reason. Believing something does not mean you're incapable of using reason where it's necessary.
The only thing you've written about that applies to all religions is the existence of faith. And as I hope I've made very clear, having faith in some things is absolutely not the same thing as the abandonment of reason. I have plenty of beliefs that I can't prove and that doesn't stop me from making rational decisions for matters that require reason and logic.
Firstly, this feature is not common to all religions. Granted, it's common to most of the most popular religions but again, this isn't something intrinsic to religion. And I don't agree that this is a very good argument anyway. Why does a central figure mean that the religion was founded to control people? All big ideas or sociopolitical movements have symbols that people can relate to, having a human at the centre of a religion is something completely natural and expected.
Again, this really irritating idea that liberal forms of religion are cheating! They're not! Adapting your faith to modern society is a strength, not a weakness.