As much as I feel that people have a right to their religious beliefs, as I think that they need them to cope with life the way that civilization is set up, I totally agree that religion is standing in the way of solving the world's problems, especially in the middle east.
As for the books we rely on for our religious instruction, they are not infallible, they were written by humans and are full of contradictions. If you truly believe that the word of God is contained in these books, you need to re-read them, these books were written when superstition and fear shaped our view of the world. Nature was the enemy we had to make submit because if we didn't, it would kill us and take over our world given to us by God.
We know a lot more about the world now. We understand the idea of eco-systems and biology, and even more importantly, we know that humans have caused the extinction of species directly. Though some of us still don't want to accept all of this, we need to change the way we behave on a planetary scale as we are leading to our own destruction.