"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama. "

Feynman, 1959 Interview (From Genius by James Gleick)

"A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe."

-Carl Sagan

On Arrogance: "I have been called arrogant in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit."

On Friendship: “A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends.”

On I.Q.: “There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.”

On Sexual Organs: “…A distressing human fact–the proximity of the sexual and the excretory organs.”

On Cancer: “To the dumb question, ‘Why me?’ the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?”

HITCHENS: Now, all of this massive Big Bang cosmological churning and destruction and annihiliation—which is paralleled, by the way on our own earth where 99% of all species that have already been on the planet have ever gone extinct, leaving no descendants. All of this could be part of a plan. There’s no way an atheist can prove it’s not. But it’s some plan, isn’t it, with mass destruction, pitiless extermination, annihilation going on all the time and all of this set in motion on a scale that’s absolutely beyond our imagination in order that the Pope can tell people not to jerk off.

HITCHENS: I think despair is quite a good starting point myself. I mean I think it’s very good to know that we’re born into a losing struggle. I think that the stoicism that comes from that and the reflection that comes from that is very useful. I’m not very impressed by people who say, “Well, I wish it wasn’t true so I’ll try and act as if it isn’t.” It is true. Everything is governed by entropy and decline and annihilation and disaster and you’re born into a losing struggle and because you’re a mammal primate, a primate mammal, you know you are and you know you’re going to die and there’ll be a lot of struggle and pain along the way.

A good aphorism is too hard for the teeth of time and is not eaten up by all the centuries, even though it serves as food for every age: hence it is the greatest paradox in literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the nourishment which—like salt—is always prized, but which never loses its savor as salt does.

• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), German philosopher. Mixed Opinions and Maxims, aphorism 168, 'In Praise of Aphorisms' (1879)

“Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humor to console him for what he is.”  ~Francis Bacon

Religion gives humans powerful explanations to the big questions of existence. The huge claims alone are attractive to people despite the lack of detailed evidence required for lesser claims.
Religion has answers that people desire to solve in our short lives but the problem is the questions religion answers only brings up more disturbing questions.  For example the  baggage of the Old Testament  stories. Why the need for  a human-god sacrifice that came late in human evolution and only to a selective few in ancient Palestine? In short religion fills the immense hole but in doing so creates many other holes which for a person seeking the truth creates the need for a more in depth search before accepting the dogmatic claims.