This is your chance to throw in those ideas you mentioned the other day. As I was reading your wallet analogy the role of stable economies in the breeding of doubts crossed my mind.

Enlighten us about the development of religions in needful societies here if nowhere else. 

Atheism is caused by birth. Lack of belief on the other hand does not exist at all - everyone alive has a belief system.

I haven't read the study, but I would second the proposition that we need to examine not only causes, but effects of belief systems (belief in the university-taught model of market economics and stock value for example) much more closely.

It's a good question - how can we end belief? It's not at all certain it is possible. After all, everyone on this site is willing to bet their life that evolution is "the truth" as presented to us today, even if all the proof they ever got is provided by authority(schools, books, professors, temples, holy books, priests). Well, everyone except me, the crazy theists and anyone fond of Aristotelian ethics.

It's not at all clear that belief is detrimental to humanity in all it's aspects either. A lot of beliefs are heuristics on stuff we don't want to bother to look into, but we do want it to work - some religious beliefs fit into this category and are an absolute marvel of gap-bridging solutions. Some of reality might even work better for us humans compacted in belief format, rather than understood fully and of course falsely. We seem to go an extra mile for something we believe in and pursue it to unexpected ends, while things we think we understand fully often are left alone and not understood at all. Some patently wrong beliefs create exploration rather than exploitation, and anyone who has dealt with search algorithms in complex solution space knows this to be an absolutely essential quality. Some beliefs introduce slack in systems that otherwise risk collapsing due to too slim margins of error, or even mitigate bad effects of total collapse of some "rational" systems (which is what Atheistextremist mentions in this same thread I believe).

Seems to me we need to look at the nature of belief in a complex system that is our world today, and I do mean complex in the terms of complex systems theory. We might find it's not at all what we thought it was as provided by the more simplistic evolutionary understanding - the we-were-too-dumb-to-know-better explanation. As someone once said and I now plagerize: evolution is much smarter than we are.

I think the study is evidence that religion is essentially an anti-anxiety drug. If people are less anxious about their economic stability, they have less of a need for religion. So I don't think religion can end with just better atheist arguments or better logic. We need better anti-anxiety treatments because even economic stability is not going to end people's anxieties about sex and death.

 This fits in very well with something I've heard before, about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (wiki). The theory was, people turn to religion to a degree that satisfies their needs, as organized by this hierarchy. So, if you are poor, struggling to get by, you will find very appealing a religion that says that in the afterlife the poor will become great and powerful and that the people who are currently wealthy and powerful (the Man, as it were) are full of sin. If you have your basic survival needs met and have the time to spend on intellectual pursuits, arts, leisure, etc. ... you don't need an omnipotent sky daddy to watch out for you, into whose hands you turn over your entire destiny. In this category you find a lot of atheists, as well as UUs, liberal Quakers, reform/secular Jews, Buddhists.

Like what? I think legalizing marijuana and prostitution would help.

But having common sense doesn't do much to provide anxiety relief. Common sense tells people that when they die, that's it. Believing in an all powerful invisible man that loves you and takes care of you for all eternity does provide relief for many. Religious people don't want drugs or sex to be legal because these drugs compete with their drugs, they want a monopoly for their business.