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I don't think that it is religion, per se, that destroys spiritual autonomy, so much as the people who lead and/or create religions for the wrong reasons.
Most religions spring up around certain central personages, or sometimes two or three personages who have been blended into a prime personage, that have demonstrated to some degree or other that they possess a larger piece of the puzzle of life than most of the other persons of their era's. By the time the religion is created around certain words, phrases, and acts these people may have done (or been perceived or reported to have done, as in the case of Christianity), the people upon whom the religion has been founded are generally dead and gone, and most often have been untimely dispatched, also then making them martyrs to the cause.
When a certain faith-based cause begins to flourish, there are always those who are ready to make a profit (not to be confused with a “prophet”, although the two may actually appear as one, which isn't necessarily a divine miracle so much as a matter of slight of hand), and who will then exploit the prime teachings of the personage upon whom the spiritual movement has been created, and thus create a “religion”.
These so-called propheteers/profiteers then begin postulating that if that originating central personage were present, they would require certain things to happen. Women should wear veils, cover their bodies from head to foot. Men should only shave occasionally, so that they retain their virility. Things like that. But another thing they will do, is institute a form of guilting that requires recompense. After all, how do you keep a religion functioning if you are not feeding the leader - right? Then the franchising out of the religion begins, more leaders are required, larger followings are required, and eventually, armies are created to ensure that there is no interference with the progress of the the now very powerful religious leaders, and their continual need to feed the larger religion machine.
So while religion, defined as the collection of teachings of one (or several) very spiritual persons does not destroy those teachings, the spiritual automony - the impetus for why the teachings were given – can become convoluted enough that it little resembles the initial intent of the teachings, once it becomes, for all intents, a business. The prime examples of this on the planet today are the Roman Catholic Church and the Muslim faith, followed closely by all of the many splinter groups of Christianity, the first of which were created primarily by Henry VIII of England, because he wanted to divorce his wife. Now there's a real fine reason to create a new religion!
So the nugget or core of what was spiritual may remain - it just may be very hard to find under the manure that gets piled on it after a while.
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