I really don't understand why a framework of personal religious beliefs needs to be rational in the first place. Many things which "rational" people hold sacred are difficult to defend on a rational basis. For example:

-The right to pursue happiness as stipulated in the US constitution. WTF does this mean for logic vs. religion? If happiness is not necessarily rooted in logic, why does logic trump religion in a discussion of religion vs. science? Logic trumps the emotional appeal of religion only in the field of rational debate, but only because the marking scheme is contrived to be so. I move that since "the right to pursue happiness" is in itself impossible to define logically, religious Americans, and atheist Americans have common ground in a pursuit which is irrational. This is a point against

-All "laws" of nature are tenets of science which CANNOT be further explained. We have to take these laws on faith that they will continue to fail to be disproven. Sure I believe that every force has an equal and opposite reaction, but I take this on FAITH. I will never be able to prove that this law is true, just as Newton failed to prove it. We have merely failed to disprove it and every observation up to this point appears to confirm this premise. While this fulfills expectations, logically this is not proof. The root of scientific understanding is therefore founded in a form of faith in something which cannot be proven further. Many of these laws or understandings have been subsequently disproven as we improved our understandings. We always thought that if you were moving towards an emitter that the emission would appear to move faster. This is the case with the Doppler effect on sound. If you run towards someone throwing a snowball at you the projectile closed with it's own speed plus your own. Michaelson and Morley proposed an experiment to determine the speed of the Earth in the ether of the universe by comparing the speed of light in perpendicular directions. The experiment was a bust in a most profound way. They could not detect any relative motion of the speed of light. No matter how carefully they rebuilt their apparatus they could not detect any difference in the speed of light under any orientation or experimental condition. Against all expectations and against several "laws" of science, they had to give up and accept a most perplexing conclusion: the speed of light is constant?! This discovery gave rise to quantum physics, a huge area of science which defines behavior which is extremely strange in comparison to our comfy Newtonian understandings.

In light of the requirement of FAITH in basic laws of science, I see a reduced difference between science and religion. About the only difference I see is that science is supposed to be self examining. We are supposed to retest our laws in order to see if we can further divide them or pull out new understanding. Organized religion can be dogmatic and protective of their old orders, but this is a human mistake which also occurs in science sometimes. I have many religious friends (my wife included) who have a flexible sense of religion. They haven't exactly proclaimed their disbelief in crazy shit like the Book of Leviticus, but their personal sense of religion appears to be reasonably reconciled with their rational needs. I believe that Einstein's personal religion was of a flexible nature. It would be contradictory for him to be a dogmatic God botherer in the church and a flexible freebooting physicist tooling around with algebra to see how he could reconcile weird shit like a unifying theory. Quantum physicists basically were free thinking enough to throw away the dogma that light behaved like a particle with inconsistent speed (across frames of reference) and bent their understandings of space and time to fit the constant of C.

Stop using a crummy understanding of science in a "rational" assault on religion. Every time I see a clip of Dawkins going off on the wickedness of religion I wonder if he has forgotten his research in evolution. Perhaps religion is an evolution of BEHAVIOR which is self propagating and has been instrumental in bringing about generally very peaceful and orderly societies. Sure you can get all retroactive and say that now we have laws and order and MRI machines, we should shitcan religion for EVERYONE, but that's just basically fascism in new garb.

Humans today are still emotionally motivated beings. We might think that we've got logical tools which superceed all other decision making apparatus but if we really thought that way we'd never get a hardon and procreate because that would be just irrational. The real trick is being able to reconcile our emotional motivations with our rational understandings. Let our rational understandings inform our emotional motivations. Maybe we don't exactly need that shiny new automobile which will unfortunately NOT get us handjobs from women we hardly know. Maybe I could stop buying so much useless crap that just goes into the dumpster and I could afford that backpacking trip in South America and eat a guinea pig on Machu Pichu.

It's illogical to be so reductive and try to pry the human condition apart. Do you think that something as sophisticated as human behavior is going to be properly reduced into some basic lego chunks by our crude rationale? Besides, what's the fun in that? I think real happiness comes from opening up your emotional motivations to being rationally informed and using one's rational powers to fulfill one's emotional desires.