I also dislike organisationed religion and was tempted to upvote this. But I don’t think we can get rid of it by simply killing the leaders, or any other magic wand. I think having moderate religious leaders in place while it slowly dies out is the best we can hope for.

what gets removed along with cron when you try?

# apt-get --dry-run purge cron cron-daemon-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  cron* cron-daemon-common*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Purg cron [3.0pl1-162]
Purg cron-daemon-common [3.0pl1-162]

nothing!