As some previous commenters have noted, religion is not God. I totally agree. As a Christian I can only speak from my years of studying the Bible, apologetics, hermeneuitcs, secular art history, and contemporary history. We have to realize that religion is also not the Bible. The Bible was spoken/written by people who had no intention of inventing the "religion" of Christianity. They were simply people who were trying to tell the stories of their lives and the lives of others that they bore witness to. They did this because they believed that God was speaking through them and that the whole world needed to hear what He had to say.

Ok, you say, then which one is true and which are false doctrine? That's an extremely important question to ask and then seek to answer. If you believe in God, and if God loves us as His children and only wants the best for us, can we ascribe to a religion that promotes severe gender inequality? Hatred? Killing? As I've studied the Bible more and more through actual scholars instead of listening to pretentious televangelists, I've found our that these questions have answers. Not all religions can support the same one God or a version of polytheism. They're at odds in more ways than they align. But God is very real underneath all of that. Corrupt religions are also very real. You have to dig deep to find the answers you need, and these answers likely require reading/talking/listening to many different "scholars" (or equivalent in amount of time and effort spent studying the topic) or people who have had amazing experiences that corroborate God's existence. It's a little complicated, but absolutely worth it. If we could drop the materialistic delusion we would see an entirely different purpose for ourselves.