Ever read "The Art of War"? Or do any martial arts of any kind? In order to do...well, pretty much anything effectively under conditions where there is opposition one must understand that opposition. If you don't, you're going to be talking gibberish as far as the people you're talking to are concerned.
My least-favorite myth about science: that all science requires experimentation.
This actually damages scientific understanding, and helps the pseudoscientists by creating a false view of what science is.
There are a few examples of religious stories that can be tested without experimentation (I'm going to stick mostly with the Christ cults, because that's what I know). A rigorous archaeological analysis of Roman records around the time Christ allegedly lived will show if there were any changes in tax law requiring folks to return to the "cities of their fathers". It's almost certainly not true, but it IS testable--through what amounts to an archive search. If someone can pin down a general location for Sodom and Gamora we can look for evidence of bolide impacts or atmospheric detonations. We can look for evidence of massive waves in the Red Sea (I've seen numerous talks where such evidence was used for paleoseismic analysis, so the techniques are well-vetted and widely accepted in the scientific community).
These are all almost certainly going to disprove the stories, but scientific proof of ancient myths HAS surfaced in the past. For example, there's Troy. and the burial chamber under the Sphinx in Egypt. Mom loves Egyptian archaeology, so we got to watch them open that chamber up. Very exciting.
Secondly, religions can be examined as a sociological phenomenon. A bit softer a science than I usually like to work with, but still a science none the less. I'd love to hear how we can do a serious sociological study of a group without understanding what they actually believe.
Not Mein Kampf, but I did read The Communist Manifesto before I started commenting on Communism (and about four years before I encountered Ayn Rand). Also, I've never pretended that understanding those ideologies was irrelevant to discussing them. You don't need to read the Bible in order to understand Catholicism, after all; and in fact only reading the Bible isn't sufficient (Catholics believe that the Bible is only one source of God's word, after all). If you can gain the understanding of what the group is saying without reading their holy book (if they have one) that's perfectly acceptable under by any standard. It's the understanding that's the issue, not the book.
I have a book on the taxonomy of dragons, and have a friend who's created a cladogram of My Little Pony characters. I've seen published cladograms of the monsters in "Where the Wild Things Are". Then there's the papers dealing with the phylogeny, taxonomy, and cladistics of a group of entirely fictional creatures created specifically for the purpose of testing taxonomy, phylogeny, and cladistics (I really need to find that again; I've always wanted to make a few stuffed animal versions, and I have a kid on the way so I have something of a time limit). Astrobiology is the rigorous study of life that we can't detect, know nothing about, and can't even prove exists. And that's not getting into the theoretical physics where the concept of "exist" and "real" break down. Then there's the long and proud history of biological and paleontological speculation about creatures that were later determined to not exist. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature actually includes requirements for addressing valid names for non-existent species.
If gods don't exist, it's hardly a serious obstacle to rigorous analysis. Science has, to put it bluntly, been there and done that.
