Your flexibility of mind is impressive, for a man of your evolutionary era. - Stephen Baxter

No," Morrow said. "I can't accept that. I don't always agree with the Planners. But they aren't killers."
"You think not?" Uvarov laughed again. "The survivalists—your 'Planners'—are psychotic. Of course. As I am. And you. We are a fundamentally flawed species. Most of humanity, for most of its history, has been driven by a series of mass psychotic delusions. The labels changed, but the nature of the delusions barely varied...

Since 1970 or thereabouts going to space has not been part of our national agenda.
NASA has kept complete control over space. But since 1970 NASA has produced paper, not spaceships.

One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.
The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.