You have made many good points (as always, I might add). You said, "Children...have brains that are hard-wired to trust adults and believe what they're told, and are very literal-minded." I believe that that is because, since we are born as defenseless infants who depend on other people to do everything for them, we need to grow up with caretakers (parents) who raise us. When people create offspring, other little people who come from them - they also raise them to be like them as well.

Children are emulators. They copy whatever people do around them. So it's making descendants from your line on the family tree, as well as descendants of what you believe.
The things you put would be simply bad parenting, for example, "...so many parents...terrorize children with vivid, traumatizing stories of eternal burning and torture to ensure that they'll be too frightened to even question religion..."
I don't know if you are dramatizing it, or if stuff like that actually happens (believable, but not all families do that), but that is bad parenting. There is a balance between telling your children stuff like that, and telling them the truth...as well as the appropriate amount for their age.

I agree with you; but am trying to remember what point I was trying to make...
I think I was just saying that children are put with parents for a reason, there are ways to abuse that power, - which is what you're talking about here.

I personally am a Christian, and I try to respect other people's opinions. But maybe I'm just trying to defend true Christianity here. I have never experienced any of these horrible things myself, but I'm just saying that there are a lot of fake Christians out there, and not all of Christianity is like that.
(I know you were talking about all religions, but I felt compelled to say something, sorry for the rant.)