Unholy religion?

From The Times (Dec. 11, 2017) ... 

Religions have brought great things to civilization: schools, hospitals, learning, science, social organisation, art, altruism.  Yet they can also bring horrors, persecutions, and injustices, contemptuous exploitation of those they consider unsaved.  Religions still protect thousands of irrational and sometimes rules that have nothing to do with spirituality or even their own founding scriptures.  

Muhammad did not demand the burka or the suicide bomber.  Christ expressed no views on whether to eat meat on Friday, keep women out of the priesthood, give cardinals red hats or condemn same-sex love.  There is no evidence that the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, ordered uncut hair and turbans; that came over a century later, for social and distinctive reasons.  Buddha certainly did not recommend the murder of the Rohinghya in Burma.  

Human beings, self-seeking and irresistibly drawn to bureaucratic dogmatism, hung all that stuff on the hook of religion.  Some of it is harmless, some terrible.  Most of all, human like to seize on the mysterious sense of the "holy" that raises an echo in every heart and gleefully use it to shore up systems of unquestioned authority.  ... Human beings have weaponised holiness, made a sword and shield of it. 

The title of the article is "Putting priests on pedestals has abetted abuse" by Libby Purves