I'd like to believe the answer to this question is yes. I'd love to hear the community's thoughts on this.
Food for thought:
I'm always amazed at how many intelligent, logically minded people are in the church and I'm sure that's a shared sentiment among exmos. To me, there is so much evidence to prove the church is more false than true, and I don't consider myself to be a super intelligent person, so when I see lawyers or scholars with PhDs still in the church, it makes me wonder how they reconcile with the cognitive dissonance. The only thing that makes sense to me is that there are more reasons for them to stay than to leave. Now the question is, are those reasons good ones?
This conversation could extend to religion in general. I'm not religious anymore but I wouldn't be ignorant enough to say that all religion is bad. However, there's still part of me that wonders if people and society would've been better off if we never made up "God" or "religion" to begin with. On the flipside, there are a lot of people who have made significant positive changes in their lives when dedicating themselves to a religion or spiritual belief system. For example, we've all heard stories of addicts having miraculous recoveries after committing their life to God. I understand that there are secular explanations to events like this, but the question is, if you live a happy and fulfilling life, what difference does it make if you believed in a fantasy or not?