Religion: ruled by fear or are we all going to Hell?

Today somebody asked me how I stood on religion. Not to thrust pamphlets into my hand or tell me I'm going to Hell but actually for the sake of philosophy and conversation. Although I'd always have said I was opinionated on the subject, I realised I hadn't thought about it in a while, and after thinking about it for a bit I came up with the following reply:
I just can't quite believe that mainstream organised religion is the answer to the supposed miracle of life. Instead, the predominant beliefs being forced down my throat sound delusional, and seem strikingly characteristic of the way the human mind works in more ways than one. It's uncanny. The way we need to idolise a leader as if escaping responsibility for our own lives saddens my sense of independence. Take Christianity for example - the bible is full of gory death, torture and punishment, yet it is humankind whose preoccupation with death makes it the worst thing in the world we can think of. It is the inevitable punishment: we are promised salvation on the one hand, but eternal damnation on the next, only serving to exacerbate our fear of death and confirming a second human characteristic: the fact that people enjoy suffering. I'm convinced of it. We impose restrictions on our own instincts - everything we enjoy in life we deprive ourselves in the attempt to convince ourselves we have control. Hence the irony of love, which brings us a contradiction of pain and joy. Even sex, our own method of continuing survival has been smothered in the social norms caught up in our warped beliefs. We have invented sin, and why? Is it so we can revel in the heightened sense of drama infusing life with meaning and satisfying the ego? Or so we can claim control over how we live, refusing to acknowledge the power of probability and chance. Those two heroes would surely make fine gods, yet our need to see the human face reflected back at us as an assurance that we are here for a reason rules non-entities out. How do we claim to have any concept of eternity when even the age of the universe is beyond our wildest dreams?