If people reject religion, are they bound to reinvent it but poorly?

In The Guardian, author John Gray argues against atheism in the best way I have seen so far from that "camp". But there are still places in his text where I think he misses the point. Gray's main point is basically, that when people free themselves from religion they are bound to reinvent it, but poorly. He argues for that a lot of the world's more recent woes have sprung from ideologies that have called themselves scientific. He admits that they were in fact pseudo scientific, but seems to argue that humans in general can never hope in the long run to do anything else than pseudo science from science in a religion rejecting society.

First, his argument that rejection of religion can lead to dangerous pseudo scientific beliefs I think is well founded. The communist societies that declared themselves atheist indeed had lots of religious patterns, that they seem to have been too blind to see. So he has a point there.

Secondly he seems to believe that humans cannot hope to develop into science-trusting rational beings, but that religion is needed to fill the "hole in our souls". Here he is on shaky ground indeed. Science can be seen as two things: facts and the scientific process.

• When adhering to a religion it is very easy to discard facts that are not in tune with the religion. If the facts have been well tested (scientifically) they would do people a lot of good, since accurate information tends to lead both to a better life for that individual and a better behaviour against other people. This is true for all people, regardless of the potential size of their "hole in the soul" and indeed it does not matter that the facts came from science. The quality of information is of crucial value.
• The scientific process is important since pseudo science can be discarded quite easily with it, since pseudo science does not follow the scientific process. Knowledge of the scientific process is therefore an insurance against it.

There is however another problem with science that Gray barely touches upon, and where I think he could find fertile ground. Science and scientific facts are often narrow in scope. What you choose to study and what problems you are formulating will therefore have a large impact. Science does not have a built in ability to balance itself in that regard. We have seen this with big pharmaceuticals only publishing the results in favour of their drug. In this way we will not know the conditions that would show something else. For more honest scientific studies the scientists will be blind to some of the assumptions that set them into a certain direction of inquiry.  For science as a whole, we do not know what implicit conditions we start with.  Gray does cover one assumption he believes atheist are blind to that hey have: The underlying assumption that society is ever improving.

One interesting part of the text is where he notes that suicide bombers happened in communist movements before islamic ones. But I see commuism as religion so that is for me not all that strange. His tracking of where the rituals actually came from is nevertheless elucidating:

But Islamists owe as much, if not more, to the far left, and it would be more accurate to describe many of them as Islamo-Leninists. Islamist techniques of terror also have a pedigree in secular revolutionary movements. The executions of hostages in Iraq are copied in exact theatrical detail from European "revolutionary tribunals" in the 1970s, such as that staged by the Red Brigades when they murdered the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978.

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