The most successful community in Ethiopia is a community that is non-religious, made men and women equal, provides education for all, promotes being good for goodness' sake, and provides social security for all.
They are attacked by their surrounding religious communities, but keep helping their neighbours regardless.
Remove religion, and life improves. Religion should be treated as tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs - something we need to detox people from.
I think social and gender equality and education, and a totally different social structure are key there. Removing religion was only a step on the way to it. If you remove religion, but keep inequality, sexism, no education, early marriage... You end up more or less the same; maybe even worse. East Germany, for example, was mostly atheist, and it didn't make it a paradise.
This remembers me the worst times in the Ulster: religion was far from being the main issue. The really hard problem is half the people wants to be only Irish, and the other half British.
Most of the time, I think religion is not a reason to do shitty things, but more as a way to justify them. Remove religion from a homophobe, and you're guaranteed to still have a homophobe. It will make a bit harder for him to justify his views or convince others, but most of religious people hardly ever do things because of religion only, no matter how they justify it. Fanatics aside, of course. But fanatics are always bad, be them religious, nationalist, sports or whatever.
