How Religion Lost

It was not the atheists that instilled doubt.

It was not the feminists who undermined your authority.

It was not the blacks or the gays or multiculturalism or other people and ideas you seem to hate who interfered with your claim to rule the world.

It was literacy.

When farmers gained the ability to read, understand, and interpret the sacred books, a power previously reserved for holy men, farmers began to notice inconsistencies. Farmers began to notice contradictions, incorrect statements, omissions, and--most importantly--clear points of distinction between what the priests declared and the books said. When the lies were revealed by the very people who had been lied to the illusion was shattered.

See, funny thing--pretty much all lies don't hold up under scrutiny.  That's why for thousands of years the clergy of the Catholic church made a point of preventing parishioners from actually understanding texts for themselves. Once higher education began to become necessary for the merchant classes, however, a new tactic had to be adopted--it was decided it was the burden of priests to learn Latin, read and interpret the books for the sake of the people, because, y'know, it's really hard. Rather than prohibiting reading, Catholics encouraged their audiences to be lazy and simply passively trust they were right and obey. That worked for most people (and still does for many), but within the Protestant persuasion (as exclusivity of knowledge was one of their bones of contention) just to be on the safe side the texts were re-written in archaic, highfalutin legalese (no, King James didn't really talk like that) in order to bore and confuse the inquisitive into stopping.

The same is true of the Glorious Qu'Ran--written in classical Arabic (the Middle Eastern equivalent of Chaucer), it is technically update-proof: any copy intended for general consumption or text which varies from the original, impenetrable writing style is considered an interpretation or translation and automatically inferior. The only way to have any idea what the whole thing Really Means is to study classical Arabic--an undertaking which only Imams and Islamic scholars would ever do.  Indeed, the idea of even praying outside of Arabic is impure among Islamic fundamentalists.

This approach to teaching is still upheld in many religions, and is generally agreed-upon to be the most useful way of holding onto followers. The rules are in the book, and the book is available, but no one really reads it. Bible study classes tend to skip around and repeat themselves in order to avoid the really embarrassing texts--Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy and Revelation, in particular--and they're always led by an authority figure who makes a point of quieting opposition and questions that get too nit-picky. The contemporary faithful are given enough to feel close without enough to understand just what it is they believe.

Because the second you understand it, you realize just how amazingly absurd it all is.