I don't like power structures but some are necessary. Take the police for example, a world where the police are not needed would be a better world. Police are a nasty coercive force. And yet they are completely essential.
Religion is interesting because it is obviously not essential in the way that a police force is. However, it isn't yet obvious that it can be done without - a religion's adherents are often people who want some sort of power structure telling them what they should do to be a good person. What it means to be a good person isn't obvious, and in practice is very complex. Sometimes a good person needs to do horrible things - we should be terrified of taking that sort of decision on personally. Sometimes bad people want to do good and would appreciate being told how.
* Political structures aren't strong enough to organise society on their own. They only communicate the beliefs of the current ruling class.
* We can do without a lot of religious dogma, which is clearly wrong (eg, anything talking about purging heretics). We need some sort of shared story for what is going on that looks a lot like a religion.
One of my favorite pieces:
There are countries where the majority is not religious and they function just fine.
And the United States as well.
Churches are full of fallible people to be sure, but in most of them, these fallible people are encouraging one another to live out what they profess to believe.
"Hey, my name's Bill, I live with my wife and two kids over by Grand & Manchester, near the post office... I'm looking to start a local club for people that believe human beings are more than just biological automata and that all souls will ultimately be reconciled to God at the end of time. I go to a lot of local meetups connected to my hobbies, but every time I bring up the Universal Reconciliation thing people start to get uncomfortable or bored, so I was hoping to find some people I could talk about this with..."
But then you've basically started a church, so...
Here's an article about their decision-making process: http://quaker.org/legacy/tqe/2005/TQE118-EN-Democracy.html
Yes, to the point where there's vocabulary to describe those types of organization, e.g.:
Of course, the scalability of these systems are unknown.
Personally I prefer to live without such influences in my life in so far as that is possible but I fully respect others' rights to do as they please.
But a healthy society can be had outside of religion.