Religion is all poppy cock, no 2 ways about it. It's a factor of human existence that's propagated purely on the survival instinct of the human child.
When younger you are programmed to believe whatever your parents tell you (if you parents told you not to go into the woods by yourself and you didn't instantly believe them, you went into the woods and got eaten by a tiger! Kids that did blindly believe their parents survived to adulthood to pass lessons onto their kids).
Religion piggybacked on this trait...pre the modern era people were less aware of how the world functioned and explained that natural world in context of magic, demons and gods. This was passed to the next generation as gospel/fact. It was only when the age of reason came about and people were able to provide logical, self consistent theories on how the universe worked that religion went into decline in general that people started to question the point of it...after all, if the aspects of the world previously attributed to gods could be explained by other means, what is the point of the gods?
Also, the human race is pre-programmed to recognise face's from random data (it gives you forewarning of the aforementioned Tiger in the woods, even if your run its better to run and be safe at the slightest inkling of danger), hence seeing Jesus everywhere, the Face of Cydonia etc etc