Biofuel: Capital's Newest Best & Safest Bolthole...?

Per my previous post, instead of sitting and pontificating around midnight I should have been reading this by Mark Lynas and Ian McWhirter from a recent New Statesman. In summary, though, it remains the case that We Are All To Blame. Or maybe I'm just acting like one whom Norman Mailer labelled 'Desperate Ambrose': the perennial ineffectual moaner, at whom the corporate fat-cats laugh with high scorn, safe in the certainty that if there is such a thing as karma in this world then they will yet be favoured by that process, i.e. such was their evil energy in this life that they will be reborn, as evil men... For these and other such thoughts read Mailer's and Mailer Jr's The Big Empty. (Re. the genealogy of 'Desperate Ambrose', I'm not sure if Mailer re-defined some pop-cultural reference entirely for his own purpose. For another take see Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Any excuse, after all...)

"Religion is ‘the new social evil’" (Rowntree report)

Did you happen to see this report in the Times? Would have made the old Quaker quake, I daresay:
"Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies... The findings contrast with [Joseph] Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling..."
Some of those old scourges have stuck around, of course. But what do you suppose has got people newly vexed about religion? Perhaps the sense that until recent years, in the UK certainly, religion had seemed not to impinge on any man or woman who had no use for it. Now it's irritatingly unavoidable in the atmosphere. I used to feel fairly glad that I had read the King James Bible and had a working knowledge of theology. At times I could see something in the Marxian idea of religion as "the soul of a soul-less world". You can't be a George Steiner fan (see below) and not have a use for some notion of 'transcendence.' And there is definitely a spiritual dimension to our lives, however one might choose to describe the spirit in question.
Used to, yes. Lately I'm rather coming round to the Bertrand Russell stance. Or as Christopher Hitchens said to Joe Scarborough: "I am atheist. I‘m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I‘m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race."
I wasn't a respondent to the Rowntree survey, and don't know what the full report amounts to, but on the basis of the coverage perhaps I can say that as a citizen my views were in some sense reflected?