Religion as Life-Denying

After a bit of pondering, I have realized what it is about most religions that bothers me (such as Christianity and Buddhism, my two main interests before I wandered over to Paganism):

Most highly developed religions (i.e. those that are the introspective product of a civilization rather than organically developed practices "on the ground") claim that there is something wrong with the universe or with humankind, and that their religion has the cure for it.

Christianity has original sin. Buddhism has craving. The key to fixing your relationship with yourself, God, or the universe is the practices of the religion.

This appear to me to be a flat-out, head-in-the-clouds denial of the universe as we have it. Having a strong scientific bent, it seemed to me that the scientific evidence points to physics and evolution as explaining the world as we see it. Yes, much, probably most, of life is ultimately tragic, but in trying to find a solution to that, most religions paper over it with a promise of salvation, rather than trying to celebrate the tragedy that is the cosmos. Christianity is particularly guilty on this front because it claims that God created the world, but that should include the laws of physics, which gives us all the variety, good and bad, that we see today.

Clearly Neopaganism in many guises may fall victim to this tendency as well, especially when heavily influenced by the New Age, or by old-fashioned Christianity. It seems to me that "getting back to nature" as a Neopagan soteriology has its dangers if divorced from an earthy, evolutionary context. I also wonder about The Summerland as a copout, though I don't think it necessarily falls into this trap.

Having said that, however, Neopaganism seems much better able to integrate into its theology the death and evil that exists in the universe. They are not desirable, but they are part of the cosmos and to pretend we can make them all go away is a delusion. At least, I'd like to think that Neopaganism does a better job of this than other religions. Of course this must take into account the fact that there is no one Neopagan religion, and that each one has no dogma that its believers are required to follow.