New polling supports old polls that religious faith correlates heavily with ignorance. Some other bloggers, including PZ Myers, have gotten on this too.
Over and over again atheists have been chastised for inventing straw men of religion. "You are only dealing with the fundamentalists," the culturally myopic say. "That group is such a tiny minority that you aren't dealing with reality. You atheists have about as much theological imagination as five year olds." They've leveled it at Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Grayling, Myers, and the rest of us. They call us shrill and fundamentalist ourselves.
"Religion does great things for people," they say. I concede that community is a great thing and that religions promote community, though generally into tribal factions that kill each other if left unregulated by principles of liberty and inalienable intersubjectively shared views on rights. But the amount of enforced ignorance, intellectual violence, mutual intolerance, authoritarian, anti-woman, and anti-democratic spew that a huge number of U.S. citizens have to swallow in order to belong to communities is garbage.
Those who who call us atheists fundamentalists need to explain away these numbers:

The poll of 2,455 U.S. adults from Nov 7 to 13 found that 82 percent of those surveyed believed in God, a figure unchanged since the question was asked in 2005.
It further found that 79 percent believed in miracles, 75 percent in heaven, while 72 percent believed that Jesus is God or the Son of God. Belief in hell and the devil was expressed by 62 percent.

That's a big fat sample.
So most U.S. citizens believe that some divine force violates the laws of the universe; they believe that an extra-universal place exist that we will be magically transported to upon our deaths to live in bliss forever, basking in the glory of an unsubstantiated God (unless we are unrepentant); they believe a man whose existence is uncorroborated by any contemporary source is both the son of a being whose existence is in unsubstantiated and is that being at the same time as well as being a disembodied spirit of that being too; they believe in lesser divine beings who are unsubstantiated but are nonetheless agents in the material world. All of these beliefs have no mechanism to explain them. All of them lack independent confirmation. All of them rest on revelation, tradition, and authority, none of which actually explain anything.
Next,

Darwin's theory of evolution met a far more skeptical audience which might surprise some outsiders as the United States is renowned for its excellence in scientific research.
Only 42 percent of those surveyed said they believed in Darwin's theory which largely informs how biology and related sciences are approached. While often referred to as evolution it is in fact the 19th century British intellectual's theory of "natural selection."

Big shock there. Faith, that anti-virtue that abhors reason and literacy, begets ignorance of the most powerful explanation of the development of the biotic world over time. The Christians and Muslims who fight against evolution tooth and nail can't resist the powerful urge to live in a blissful wish. You were specially created by the most powerful being in the universe who had you in mind from the very beginning and wants you to have a special relationship with him that he always intended you to have because he knew you before you were born because you were made in His image. He wants you to know that he loves you as he loves himself. Of course, it is a servile relationship where he is the master and you are the servant, essentially enslaved to a celestial dictatorship no different from the cults of personality used by Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Kim Jung Il, or Saddam Hussein. Don't actually question the mind behind the curtain, just love him and obey. Look! Listen! Kneel! Pray!

What is perhaps surprising is that substantial minorities in America apparently believe in ghosts, UFOs, witches, astrology and reincarnation.
The survey, which has a sampling error of plus or minus two percent, found that 35 percent of the respondents believed in UFOs and 31 percent in witches.
More born-again Christians -- a term which usually refers to evangelical Protestants who place great emphasis on the conversion experience -- believed in witches at 37 percent than mainline Protestants or Catholics, both at 32 percent.

Why should this be surprising at all? When you believe in one set of nonsense with no evidence behind it why stop there? Why not believe in vampires or sorcery? Many a Christian will laugh at the "primitives" of Papua New Guinea, the Kalahari, or the Amazon for holding animistic beliefs. What is really so different about these beliefs other than the dogmas and traditions that have been erected around them?
As I wrote in the New York Times a couple of years ago in response to an article about creationist trips down the Grand Canyon:

To the Editor:
It is unsurprising to me that the ''intelligent design'' movement has brought about a resurgence in activity (at least perceived activity) among creationists. Their views are so fundamentally antiscientific that it's a wonder they believe in them.
You report that Tom Vail, who leads Canyon Ministries trips down the Colorado River, suggests that the Grand Canyon is only 4,500 years old -- an idea easily debunked by any competent geologist.
If we allow this anti-reasoning into our classrooms as the creationists and intelligent design proponents hope to do, precedent would demand that courtrooms allow supernatural explanations of culpability, including demons, angels, ghosts, goblins, trolls, vampires and aliens.
By denying the methods of testing in science, the creationists also deny the burden of proof in the rule of law. Our country can suffer no such attack.

Reason is an inoculation to faith. Science and logic are the most powerful tools reason has. When science is applied to the questions of faith in a rigorous fashion, faith begins to wither. Our most cherished beliefs rest upon our own senses of specialness. But just because we believe in our specialness (an is in this case), doesn't mean that it follows that we are cosmically special. What we want isn't what ought to be.
Of course we desire to be cosmically special. Our sentience and sapience resist our senescence. We hope beyond reason that we can somehow transcend our mortality and our finite existences. Faced with the absurdity of the fact that we are just tiny biotic specks in an enormous universe, we seek consolation. Science takes a lot of that away and evolution in particular, acting as a "universal acid" (see Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea), eats through our most cherished notions. Because we lack any positive evidence for the existence of a loving creator, evolution overwhelmingly implies that we were not specially created by a loving God who had us in mind when s/he or it created the universe. Instead, we came about by a gradual 3.6 billion year process of descent with modification through replication of various kinds, mutation (and other randomizing factors), and natural selection that has resulted in a species known as homo sapiens that will also one day no longer exist on planet earth.

We will either go extinct or evolve, very gradually, into a species that will no longer be recognizable as homo sapiens. We are not cosmically special and exempt from the rules and laws of the universe.
That isn't to say that we aren't special. My son and my wife are the most beautiful things in the world to me and I hold them as dearly to myself as I think it is humanly possible to do. My own existence is enough to fill my sense of me with meaning as I wade through, swim in, and ride upon the great river of life. But I understand, at least partially, my finite existence and am as unfooled as I can be by my own egocentric and anthropocentric desires. I'm sure that your existence, as tenuous as it might be, is full of things that propel you to act every day. Can you do it without wish-thinking? Because wish-thinking and its religious embodiment take a tremendous toll on us.
The above numbers also correlate overwhelmingly with some other ugly trends (see this this older post). Where we see higher levels of evolution denial and religious observance, we also find abstinence-only education, higher STD infection rates, higher rates of teen pregnancy, lower literacy rates, and higher poverty. Religion does incredible violence to individuals and communities because it mandates that people believe in stupid things for bad reasons when there are perfectly good things to accept or believe in that are overwhelmingly supported by available evidence.
Once again, if you think that we are fighting with straw men, then pony up with some evidence to back it up. Stop defending "belief in belief" as Dennett calls it in Breaking the Spell. Stop sticking your head in the ground and look over the grasses. There are lions and hyenas on our savanna.