Has religion solved anything?

[patrice]

87. Thank you for this. Of course, that's true! And it can be true of any similar effort/religious brand

I think errors arise from dishonest or mistaken priorities. If the organization is more important than the truth, then the effort is not free and skew is introduced, which would be okay as long as it is recognized for what it is and it is rationalism's job to do that, recognize contextual knowing (a PROCESS). Religion avers that effort and claims the absolute goal, while dishonestly or mistakenly denying unavoidable perspective/context/bias and at the same time IDENTIFYING with the universal.

In rational terms, that CAN be done through inference, but rationalism claims no necessary relationship between inference and validity, only a probabilistic one that is validated or not, discovered to be reliable or not, through the step-wise processes of deductive rational epistemologies. Inference can produce hypotheses, but those hypotheses produce knowledge by means of rational empiricism.

In religious terms, one begins and ends with inference. The relationship between inferrer and the inferred is considered necessary/inherent and it is identification with the inference that makes it the truth and social confirmation provides support, not empirical knowledge, in fact empirical knowledge controverts "belief" (John 20 something).

Again, error is not necessary in religious phenomenon (one can "guess" emergent properties or evoked potentials correctly), but the progressions in the sorts of things that produce error is geometric, so error is exponentially much more probable from religious inferences compared to rational inferences. That'd be okay, i suppose (because there is still some remote probability that a truth that would be missed by rationalism could be extrapolated by religion), but religion does not appear to incorporate its own potential for the invalid into its identity, in fact, the further the inferential leap, the more religious. It begins and ends with submission to an inference, whether it is valid or not is considered anti-thetical to "the Truth".