Self-responsibility

This thought occured to me earlier today. As a backlash against the Leftist surrender of reason to attacks on everything American, today's Conservatives extoll a return to "self-responsibility".
Yet, isn't religion, faith, and every act concerning these two ways of conducting one's life....a total abdication of thought, therefore action, in reality. Evasion on such a complete scale is a total surrender of the responsibility of being (and becoming) a human being [i.e., a rational animal].
To accept one thing, anything, on faith, is to cripple the actual and proper function of one's mind. In short, sense perception, concepts, logic. Ayn Rand said once, "The alleged shortcut to knowledge, which is faith, is only a short-circuit, destroying the mind."
I cannot tell you how many people I hear openly say "I can't wait to die." Now, they don't use these exact words, but they are quite close. Moreso than you'd think. I'm starting to think that each time I hear someone say the usual refrain, "Lord, have mercy on me. Take me away from all this," means, actually means, "I'm ready to die, Lord."
More and more, and especially in the last few years, I'm thinking that religion, religious belief, is slow psychological suicide. Suicide, whether it takes a moment, a day, 30 or 100 years, you are committing yourself to a slow death. To be religious is to cast a pall over your own life and mental functioning.
That's why I'm so glad I was introduced to Ayn Rand's writing's. She said another true gem when she made the statement, "It is philosophy that got us into this mess, it is only philosophy that can get us out." She did not say this outright (at least I don't think so) but I will. It is only Objectivism that can "save" man, and therefore, the world.