I'm a day or so late celebrating Freedom of Religion Day, but it's taken me a while to put this into readable form. For me, it means freedom to take the concept apart and see what reality might actually be behind it, if any.
You've probably all heard the story/parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant.
When I first got interested in how the human mind worked and what the framework was that it was working in (primarily in response to Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, which showed me how many more questions there were than answers), I ran across a book by S.I.Hayakawa called Language in Thought and Action (the earlier editions are better written, imo). Among the things that I took away from that was the concept of words needing solid referents before you could use them to think with or to communicate well.
In the process of trying to convert my vocabulary, I found areas where it was, seemingly, impossible to define referents well enough to trust anything that was being said or thought. These included, not surprisingly, religion, spirituality, the psychic realm, love, much of human emotion and interaction, creativity, etc., etc..
But even though there wasn't enough there to really define concepts that would make sense of the areas, there were patterns within and among the words that spoke of there actually being something, or several somethings, behind all the verbiage and feuding that was going on. And that's when I started looking for Blind Men.
The premise of the whole process is that people try to speak truthfully about what they encounter, and that they will, as much as they can, use what they already know to describe the phenomenon. It followed, I hoped, that with enough different descriptions from enough different viewpoints it might be possible to get a clear picture of what, and how many, different phenomena they were attempting to describe. In other words, put enough blind men around the elephant, and you will eventually get a pretty good description of the elephant, if you're willing to accept that multiple "truths" may all be wrong and yet accurately descriptive in toto.
Which means that from that point of view "a god" and "a delusion" could simply be two descriptors for the same phenomena, along with a huge number of other various concepts, all of which may be partial descriptions of what appear to be multi-cultural phenomena, extending over thousands of years. Which is why I find it hard to become too distraught over arguments in the area.
I have no answers yet, except for a nagging feeling that the phenomena sometimes described as god might include useful tools if all the embroidery around the concepts could somehow be gotten rid of. So this isn't anything except an invitation to think about joining me in hunting for the blind men, and what's behind all their various and sundry descriptions. Your whiplash quotient may vary.