Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
From my observations (limited though they may be), I feel that the more people learn about religions, all religions, not just their own, the less they are likely to be taken in by them.
If you mean exposure to a wide variety, I don't see evidence for this. For example, most of today's British Muslims have, whether they wanted it or not, been exposed to calculatedly multi-cutural religious studies from primary school. The result, in many cases, seems to have been to make them much more devout believers than their parents for whom Islam was just the way things were.
I've read several articles by graduates of seminary schools who say it is virtually impossible for an intelligent person to get through graduate school and retain his faith.
I'm not clear if you mean seminary school or college in general?
Also, the more you learn about the real world, and science in particular, the more you realize how bizarre and unrealistic religious dogma is. While science can not prove there are no gods, it can show that the gods who are worshiped around the world cannot possibly exist as defined by their religions.
Obviously, in the crude sense that you can't treat science and any creation myth as co-existing descriptions of the material world. But religions have been coping with that ever since people discovered that there weren't really any gods at the top of Mount Olympus.

You underestimate the human ability to hold contradictory beliefs in parallel. Doublethink is a normal and necessary part of human nature, even scientists have to do it. Quantum mechanics and relativistic physics are not compatible as descriptions of the world, but very few scientists conclude that one of them must be false; they just accept that each description is true (or, to be strictly accurate, "the best working description of reality we have so far") in its proper context. Plenty of us are equally able to accept that materialism and religion are each true in their proper context, even though, like quantum and relativity, they contradict each other if we try to apply them together.
One reason the Catholic Church tried to prevent the Bible form being published in the vernacular was to keep the faithful from actually reading it and learning how screwed up and contradictory it is, and how evil and nasty their God is.
At the time, it had more to do with keeping people from finding how much there was in it about exalting the poor, and putting God's laws before the state's, and everyone being equal in the sight of God, and subversive stuff like that. It led to massive social upheavals led by fanatical believers who had read the book from cover to cover, and only lost faith in the established Church and State.
I see virtually all religions as being oppressive, trying to keep people in their places rather than helping them to improve themselves. Again, an intelligent, educated population is a dangerous population. They can learn to see the fallacies behind the religions, and the politics.
History doesn't bear you out. In the golden age of Islam, Muslims were far better educated than Europeans, but their faith was no weaker. When Europeans became better educated, it led to Protestantism, not materialism; a Church led by a handful of fanatics was replaced by one with fanatics in every little chapel. And, of course, for a thousand years Europe's Jews were the most highly educated people, but didn't lose their faith in consequence.
Teaching people they cannot improve themselves without God's help only makes them less likely to really try to improve.
There are countless examples of people who have improved themselves because they believed that they had God's help. I am totally neutral on the question of whether they actually had any supernatural aid: all I'm saying is that, by their own testimony, their faith didn't hold them back, it helped them on.
And, especially in the Catholic Church, forbidding any form of birth control almost guarantees large families which keeps a poorer population.
True, but mostly irrelevant to the topic. Your insistence on seeing all forms of religion as slightly different versions of your birth faith constantly misleads you.
The more we learn about the real world, the less room there is for supernatural explanations. Teaching our children how the world really works will be far more beneficial for their futures than burdening them with superstitions.
Unless we're talking about creationists, or the religious opponents of sex education, this is a straw man. My children, and everyone else's, learn science. Whether they also learn religion is a separate issue.