I'm not sure to which degree this is an answer, but it's a bit long for comments.
My view is somewhere between "religion needs to be eradicated" and having a "live and let live" attitude towards people with religious beliefs. One significant issue is that religion often specifically demands not living and let live, and instead pushing your beliefs on everyone else (and religion influences morality, and the law we're all subject to is based on the morality of the population).
Religion has certainly done harm on obvious massive scales, like the crusades. But religion (specifically Christianity) has also done harm on not-actually-much-less-massive scales, like oppressing (including torturing and even killing) people due to their sexuality or gender, oppressing women, arguably making slavery last longer than it did, and indoctrinating and sometimes traumatising children (who would later grow up to be atheists who would rather that they weren't subjected to that), just off the top of my head.
I accept that religion provides value to people's lives: this fact of reality is hard to deny, but I also consider this value to come with far too much baggage to be left alone, and whatever value it provides can be found elsewhere.
Of course altogether banning all religion is a terrible idea, but religion would be far less common if everyone were given a proper scientific, logical reasoning and critical thinking education. We could insist, for example, that the formal education of every child must include scientific facts such as evolution, and not that the Earth is 6000 years old (which some people in the modern day believe), even if their parents may try to teach them otherwise outside of formal education.
The focus on science (and reason) vs religion in your question is curious, because science is, in many cases, simply not the appropriate means to deal with e.g. questions of finding meaning in life (but there are other non-religious means).
"Science can never provide answers to questions of meaning and value ... and yet these questions do need answers"
Science explains the how of our existence, which suggests that there isn't an intentional why, and what is meaningful is left for us to figure out for ourselves. This is true or false, and if it's true, the only alternative to accepting it would be to live in denial, which is not really ideal.
Finding one's own meaning is also not really bad, since any given individual should know best what that individual wants and what gives them meaning (this may not always or strictly be true, but it's usually better than having a third-party prescribe an unwanted meaning for them).
A sense of meaning based on falsehoods that comes with a whole lot of other very questionable and objectionable claims about what's true and what's right, and which is prescribed to others (often with threats of eternal punishment, and associated trauma, as per the most popular religion in the world), is problematic on many levels.
"Very basic principles such as 'Killing is bad', 'Raping is bad' and 'Small children should be loved' need to be transcendent"
Except ... they aren't, even in religion.
If religion is made up, then these principles are simply what one person, or a group of people, thought best. This certainly wouldn't be transcendent, and isn't really superior to establishing these principles within societies. It's often worse, as many people have at least some objectionable moral views, and if these are attached to a religion, they can stick around far longer than they otherwise would, had society just matured to past such views without religion.
But also, across time, people of the same religion have had very different views on very fundamental moral questions such a killing and owning other human beings. People tend to dismiss whichever religious moral commandments they dislike - this tends to happen when society has just matured so far past any given view, that it just seems absurd to consider it moral, e.g. slavery.
Our biology provides some universality to morality (we know what it's like to suffer and most of us feel empathy), and reason is far more effective than deities of questionable existence with unclear properties at making morality more universal (through reason, we've come up with entire moral frameworks, e.g. utilitarianism).
"I find religious ritual, and acts such as prayer and meditation to be very useful, maybe even necessary"
I somewhat agree, but there is no reason you can't have such rituals outside of religion.
Many people meditate without attaching it in any way to religion.
Most of the benefit that prayer provides can also be attained through meditation, and through self-affirmations and whatnot. Such measures also avoids the downside of prayer, which is that you rely on a non-existent deity to do things for you, which may prevent you from taking measures yourself to address whatever you're praying about.
Religion provides a sense of community, but you can also find a sense of community through hobbies, based on where you're from, or based on nothing in particular.
It's odd that you, as an atheist, seem to be arguing that religion is necessary for meaning and morals, which suggests that you have neither of those things. If you've found them elsewhere, or you've found them in "religion without religion" (religious structures and ideas without religious beliefs), you would be a living counter-example of your own argument.
