I enjoy discussing with fans of Jordan Peterson in particular, because I feel the Canadian psychologist and his smarter followers do make the "Steel Man" Argument; that is, the best version of the arguments I (generally) oppose. As my hero, John Stuart Mill said, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
The 'Petersonians' take a somewhat lenient outlook that could be summarised in: "Believing religion is somehow responsible for human atrocity is scapegoating or externalising". And yet this is coming from people that often liken Atheism to Nihilism, and then to Gulags. I call this The Yoda's Slippery Slope: "Everything I don't like leads to the Dark Side".
There are a few problems with this. Even by Peterson's own arguments, religion is a mechanism explicitly evolved as means to coalesce large populations. It fulfilled a necessary role in the development of human societies. Sure. No one with a passing knowledge of anthropology can dispute that. But then it means it was omnipresent until the enlightenment, and still prevalent since. We can't possibly absolve religion from all the atrocities committed in the name of God(s), and it isn't scapegoating when said "goat" is a necessary catalyst of authoritarian regimes.
This isn't about believing in some inherently good, primal innocence of humankind. As much as I agree with Hitchens in that religion poisons everything, I don't think that once we got ourselves free from this 'god virus' we will forever live in peace and harmony and sing some sort of atheist Kumbayah. That would be puerile. Human nature is much complicated than that. Not even Dawkins agreed with the title "root of all evil" that Channel 4 added to his now classic documentary about religion.
My thesis here is perhaps as unfalsifiable as Peterson's, but I claim the same right to make it. And I am not the only one. For example, Paul Taylor from Pew Research has been measuring the decline in religiosity across the whole western world, not to mention China and Japan. I'd suggest this dwindling of religion is about a passage to a new way of being, the emergence of a different social glue that isn't so much based on magical thinking and; especially not, in exclusive narratives. Here is the key. When I see Peterson's emphasis on Judeo-Christian myths, I see a fanboy defending why DC Comics is better than Marvel or vice-versa. I think we should like or dislike all comic-books equally and only based on their content, not the editorial. I'm more than happy with harvesting metaphorical wisdom from said stories, as long as they don't turn into a real belief.
What's the danger of genuine belief, you may ask? Well, see where the aforementioned decline in religiosity isn't happening.
The Middle East.
How does Islam resist the advance of Atheism? By threats of banishment, and more often than not, death.
Of course, like everything in natural selection and the equilibrium of Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, the transition to irreligiosity isn't guaranteed. But at least you can say the momentum of any transformation builds up in the previous stage. Polytheism gave rise to Henotheism, and that gave birth to Monotheism. It only makes sense that we go one god further.