While Richard Dawkins makes a name for himself today criticizing religion and those who are religious (Youtube clips here), Bernard Shaw had similar comments 100 years ago. In the Nov. 30, 1906 NYT:

Bernard Shaw lectured to-night in the Essex Hall, in connection with the Guild of St. Matthew, his subject being "Some Necessary Repairs to Religions." Mr. Shaw said we had a great many pressing social problems to solve, but lacked a religion which would impel us to tackle them.

The Socialism presented by those able middle-class Jews, Marx and Lasalle, was a demonstration that the workingmen were being robbed of 50 per cent. of the proceeds of their labor, but it was found that people would not make a revolution for 50 per cent. Men were always cowards. If they were not afraid they would not be constantly be getting run over. The more intelligent and sensitive a man was the more cowardly he was.

Those are some tough words in just the first two paragraphs of the story. Yet, the third paragraph is even tougher:

If the great congregation of cowards called the human race were to be got to disregard their own safety and interest, they must be made religious. A religious man was not one who belonged to the Church of England or who did not...[n]or was he a man with a special creed. A religious man was one who had sure knowledge that he was here, not to fulfill some narrow purpose, but as an instrument of the force which created the world and probably the universe. Religion made a man courageous, and if he was not intelligent it made him extremely dangerous. In the absence of religion a coarse man had the most courage, but with religion the most fragile and sensitive became enormously courageous.