Since existence of the term "losing your religion", a phenomenon so common it fosters the conceit that humanity neatly divides into atheists and idiots.

That "solution" is popular but rarely sustainable. As conflicting data mounts the tension will usually snap sooner rather than later, so that one is discarded in favor of the other, both are integrated or the mind is reduced to a mass of cognitive dissonance and nothing more.

Well, yes, if one only maintains a superficial connection to a thing its conflicts with the rest of ones life can easily be dismissed in the few cases where they are even recognized. That kind of pro forma involvement is not terribly relevant here though; one can hardly be said to abandon that which they were only nominally practicing from the start.

I see this a lot of places; one can reject spiritual and supernatural observations and experiences that conflict with a greater body of scientific ones as easily as the reverse. It cuts both ways and is a regrettable consequence of absorbing rather than examining ones beliefs. This is the first of the cases referenced above, where two inflexible beliefs conflict and the one with greater mass ultimately annihilates the other. Any time one is conditioned to think exclusively in one way and ask only permissible questions in prescribed terms it becomes a real danger, not only to the belief system challenging the dominant one, but to a deep understanding of the dominant one, since science and religion are relatives in a metaphysical family properly about asking questions rather than confirming answers.

To a great extent religion and science investigate different aspects of existence in different ways, and so share few vital particulars in their common general inquiry. The best leaders of both recognize that there are few particulars truly VITAL to either; investigating the unknown carries a great degree of uncertainty that makes many beliefs generally regarded as irrefutable merely very likely, and always subject to revision. Again, when science or religion ceases self examination it usually sacrifices credibility and relevance. Consequently, the alterations required to reconcile one with the other affect tenets that never should have been present to begin, let alone considered incontrovertible. The best examples that come to mind are the Catholic Churchs resistance to heliocentrism (irrelevant to Christianity unless one insists both that the bible is irrefutable AND that a few very figurative and poetic passages must be literal) and scientists resisting the Big Bang as <a href="http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/bang.php">religion disguised as science</a>. As with heliocentrism, the latter criticism is as old as its subject theory, and the article citing it just as instructive as that earlier debacle, but I will save that for your final alternative.

This is not so much an additional option as an inversion of the third one; when ones detailed analyses of religion and science conflict the former can be as easily discarded as the latter, and with no more justification. As promised, I will illustrate this with the article linked:

The author is quite right about the need for any investigation to question its assumptions (as I also noted earlier), but makes two massive (if typical) assumptions throughout: That religion is both false and assaulting science. This is unfortunate on several levels. His zeal to refute religions inroads on science causes several errors obvious even to a layman like me, such as the contention that Columbus pioneered belief in a spherical Earth (at best tangential to geocentrism) and that the universe is said to be 28 billion light years wide because the Earth is thought to be at its center (the "edge" of the universe is thought to be irregular, and the concept of its "center" to have even less validity than that of its boundary). Far worse, he cites some issues I already raised (the First Law of Thermodynamics and Newtons (perhaps) less relevant First Law of Motion) as PROOF the Big Bang is invalid because they suggest a supernatural agency is required, and anything involving the supernatural is, of course, by definition invalid (in his mind). Had he bothered to consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics he might have realized that tossing out the Big Bang on the grounds that the First Law says matter and energy cannot be created only makes things worse, since the universe that has been losing kinetic energy to friction for billions of years still has a TREMENDOUS amount of it. Sadly, his goal is to destroy religion rather than advance science, which impedes his understanding of both; the fact that the Big Bang neatly fits MY faith makes it intolerable to HIS "science". This is a recurring problem with such fierce biases, whether against religion or science and, IMHO, the ultimate cause for so many scientists seeking increasingly elaborate ways to fit the cosmological data to their entirely natural curve just as the author accuses (and then does himself).

That also cuts both ways; for every isolated religious person who never questions his religion because he never has cause there are at least as many who abandoned a religion after entering an environment where they felt religious beliefs marked them as unsophisticated, closed minded and/or unimaginative. To say that it is not reason but emotion that makes people embrace religion is no more fair than to say that it is not emotion but reason that makes people embrace science. The math may be as cold as interstellar space, but ask a hundred scientists in any branch why they chose that career and I bet not one says, "it was the rational thing to do". For that matter, I would go double or nothing on the proposition that many aspiring scientists hastily abandon even the appearance of religious notions to seek acceptance from others in their field just as passionate on the subject as Richard Dawkins is. To reiterate yet again, the suggestion that science, reason, logic etc. are realms inhabitated only by a small areligious gentlemans club does a disservice to science as much as to religion (to say nothing of humanity as a whole). As you are likely aware, such disappointment here is not new to me, but it remains regrettable nonetheless.