I beg to differ. Religion in itself is not about enslavement and control.
One day I realized that I know almost nothing about my heritage, that is to say, the Christian influence by which you and I (if you are a westerner) grew up.
All of a sudden I found that strange. I was studying Eastern philosophy and religion, and quite intense. I did not do the same for Western theology and religion. I asked myself why that was so. It dawned on me that I had thrown out the baby out with the bathwater.

So, if someone intends to demoralize you and push you towards despair or nihilism or cynicism, he might be satisfied to find you ripped off your religion.

The Church did, in an evil hour, consent to imitate the commonwealth and employ cruelty. But if we open our eyes and take in the whole picture, if we look at the general shape and colour of the thing, the real difference between the Church and the State is huge and plain. The State, in all lands and ages, has created a machinery of punishment, more bloody and brutal in some places than others, but bloody and brutal everywhere. The Church is the only institution that ever attempted to create a machinery of pardon. The Church is the only thing that ever attempted by system to pursue and discover crimes, not in order to avenge, but in order to forgive them. The stake and rack were merely the weaknesses of the religion; its snobberies, its surrenders to the world. Its speciality — or, if you like, its oddity — was this merciless mercy; the unrelenting sleuthhound who seeks to save and not slay.

The Eastern mysticism is an ecstasy of unity; the Christian mysticism is an ecstasy of creation, that is of separation and mutual surprise. The latter says, like St. Francis, “My brother fire and my sister water”; the former says, “Myself fire and myself water.”

G. K. Chesterton