[pols45]

Science doesn't provide a Priest who will show up and sit with you at your time of grief or despair in handling the unpredictable. Priests in all religions are trained to occupy that space. And that is the prime reason Religions have survived for thousands of years long past the death of empires, kings and nations who all get tired or bored of showing up and occupying the unpredictability space.

Lot of that Despair is thanks to how the architecture of the chimp brain handles unpredictability over different time horizons - whats the system going to do tomorrow/next month/next year/next decades. Confidence decreases anxiety increases. You want to break the architecture keep feeding it the unpredictable.

So we get the corporal hudson in aliens cycle - "I'm ready, man. Check it out. I am the ultimate badass. State of the badass art" > unpredictability > "Whats happening man! Now what are we supposed to do? Thats it man. Game over man. Game over!"

Think about what science offers corporal hudson.

[Nevermark]

I have considered the problem of how the strong social benefits and cohesion of religion might be reproduced in some way not tied to the very strange attractor of identity based beliefs and shibboleths.

Science, democracy, religion. Three curses. Each embodying ideals. Each the best choice we have for the areas where they do or have functioned well. Each presenting challenges, and dysfunctional local maxima, as maintenance/optimization problems.

Of the three, science's self-correcting basis does make it the least problematic.

In the highest contrast, mathematics foundations are only weak if you look! Whereas the piles built on debatably wobbly foundations hold up extremely well.

[BLKNSLVR]

So, basically:

Where science can't make you better, non-science can make you feel better.

Where truth is painful, untruth can attempt to provide comfort.

(not sure how any of this relates to the comment or the article, maybe I should have just ignored this)