I personally feel religion is a type of feeling as innate as sensuality; one of those pre-logical things that simply grips people and leaves them with certain spiritual urges. This is the reason for things like sudden 'revelations' which lead people to convert or phenomena like 'religious ecstasy' where people are overwhelmed by spiritual feeling, or moments near death when people feel compelled to seek comfort in religion. I think that pure atheists are basically like those people who find it easy to abstain from sex. It's possible certainly, and makes certain people happy, but it's not for everyone, and many people will find some expression of religion eventually, with attempts to suppress it leading merely to strange pathologies.