"Good" religion?

The idea that all religion is harmful, vs. the idea that harm is a bug rather than a feature of religion, is something I have been struggling with for some time now. There are branches even in American Christianity that genuinely are about loving your neighbor rather than acting as a cloak for bigotry, and that were instrumental in calling out and changing the bigoted beliefs I held when I was younger. (Beliefs that were implanted into me by religion in the first place, mind you. Nevertheless, beliefs that I began to question and ultimately reject because of religion).

But... as far as I can see, even the "good" types of religion have, by the very nature of BEING religion, at least four built-in, unavoidably harmful elements. 

1. Credulity. Religion asks people to take things on faith - to believe things without evidence or even despite the evidence. And that is, in itself, harmful. Believing things without evidence is exactly how we get bigotry - it's how people end up believing in some nefarious "gay agenda", or that vaccines cause autism and bleach enemas "cure" autism and that "curing" autism would even be a desirable outcome, or that there are Jewish space lasers causing California wildfires... Is it possible for there to be a religion that does NOT train people into the habit of accepting untrue things as truths? I haven't seen any. Certainly none of the big five meet that standard.

2. Tribalism. Religion by its nature creates an in-group, and defines itself by how what THIS group believes is different from what every other group believes. That's true for any set of beliefs, but religion takes it a step further by either implying or saying in so many words that anyone who doesn't share the belief isn't merely mistaken or misguided, but actually ascribing to an inherently inferior moral standard. You don't get to just agree or disagree with a religious IDEA in a debate, you are also declaring your loyalty or opposition to that TRIBE of believers and declaring them to be superior or inferior morally.

3. Claims to an absolute and unchangeable truth. Humans are finite, our understanding is finite, and we should take from that the lesson that we always ought to learn, grow, expand our understanding and even our methods for gaining understanding. A sensible worldview would always leave space for questions, would not claim to be the final and unquestionable answer. But any religion will claim that it IS the final and unquestionable answer. Science is able to correct its errors within the space of a few years by getting more information and creating better frameworks for understanding the information, while religion inherently is "the same yesterday, today, and forever". So when we try to learn new things, religion is by its nature opposed to doing that, because learning new things means questioning old certainties... and religion exists to BE an old certainty. Religion can't correct its errors, because it's not able by its nature to concede that it ever makes any.

And all of these inevitably lead to the most dangerous thing inherent to religion:

4. Authoritarianism. If you've taught people to believe truth claims without evidence on the say-so of an authority figure, and you've taught people that anyone who disagrees with your claims to truth is not only wrong about their facts but also wrong about their morals and an enemy of your tribe (which the human brain interprets as a danger to survival), and you've taught people that there's no room for new ideas to question your truth claims... then you've really taught people to accept authoritarianism as a good thing rather than the inherent evil that it actually is. It's no coincidence that the more religious people are, the more they tend towards conservatism and authoritarianism. Religion primes people for those things, because religion can only survive in a world where the majority of people buy into those things. 

It doesn't matter whether the authoritarian leader is a pastor, priest, rabbi, imam, or shaman; it doesn't even matter whether your particular religious leader is actually a good person doing good things with their authority; the structure for making people accept authoritarianism is built in. It doesn't matter whether your in-group's "outsiders" are defined by their theology or their race or their politics; the structure for making people demonize the "outsiders" as evil rather than merely different or mistaken is built in. It doesn't matter whether the unverified truth claim is that there's a god or reincarnation or Nirvana or karma or spirits or just some general Higher Reality that's beyond our ability to perceive or test; the structure for making people accept unproven claims as true is built in. And all of those elements are the soil in which the weed of authoritarianism grows and thrives and ultimately chokes out everything but itself.