As to whether “the practices of science” are antithetical to “the practices of religion”. No not necessarily I agree. But the scientific method produces knowledge that does, in my view, irreparably refute the propositional basis of both revealed and natural religion. That said, of course you can as a matter of fact be religious (ie. be a member of a church, accept Christian morality etc) without believing that religious doctrine is “literally” true. This is one form of Christian atheism, but not, for me, the most interesting form. And it is not interesting because under current social conditions Christian morality (as far as I am concerned) is redundant.

That is also why in my view it is mistaken to believe that secularized societies have a “motivational deficit” which can be only be solved by translating religious practices/concepts into secular terms. Most secularized societies that we know are capitalist societies and, as such and for Marxian reasons, they are not under our control. In a situation in which important social relations are effectively out of our hands, ethics of authenticity (a la Nietzsche or Sartre) or of lightness and mundaneity (a la camp and – as I read him – Raymond Roussel) or of truth-seeking (a la Leo Strauss) are more powerful and attractive than translated Christian ethics, which ultimately also serve to secure the system. So when I suggest that avowed atheists might take over the Churches, I’m thinking of this merely as a way of loosening state sovereignty without succumbing to libertarianism or anarchism. But it’s not practicable, obviously.

But your argument seems to assume that religions are constitutively opposed to science and technology. Granted, there are many examples where institutional religions have been and are the enemies of scientific inquiry. Such a stance is common enough among those who profess to seek empirical truths about the world in the various texts they take to contain the literal word of God. While some religious people and associations feel the validity of their religion challenged by technological development, many don’t see science as an “argument against religion’s validity claims.” Is your argument dependent on an antithetical relationship between the practices of science and those of religion?