The problem is that knowledge, the signals our minds extract from the oceans of noise, are what resonates and synchronizes with our prior knowledge. So it ia process of expansion and consolidation, like rings of a tree, or layers of a pearl around the grain of sand at the center.

Yet that core, those foundational childhood memories and lessons, originated from our smallest knowledge base.

Religions are like the childhood memories and lessons of a culture. They are the most basic common denominator around which large numbers of people can gravitate. Yes, they might make no sense whatsoever.

Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures.

To the Ancients, gods were metaphors. The conceptual building blocks of thought and communication. Gods of love, war, seas, beauty, hunting, etc. Over time, personified and anthropomorphized. In this world, monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule one god.

The original Jewish form was explicitly not anthropomorphized, but idealized as language and structure. God is the Word and the Word is God. Encapsulated in the Ten Commandments. Don't dis God, don't mess with your neighbor's wife, or take his stuff, don't covet what you don't have and be happy with what you do, etc. Not quite yet freedom of speech, or trial by a jury of one's peers, but a good start.

Ancient Israel was also a monarchy. The Big Guy Rules. Like the religion.

The origins of the Christian Trinity go to fertility rites. The young god, born in the spring to the old sky god and earth mother. Though by the age of the Olympians, Zeus didn't make way for Dionysus. Tradition and power prevailed over youth and renewal. Which was why the story of Jesus had such resonance.

Though by the time Constantine adopted it as the state religion of Rome, it too had started to calcify and so the monotheism served to validate the Empire and bury any reminders of the Republic. The Big Guy Rules.

So the Catholic Church served as the eschatological basis for European monarchy. Divine right of kings, as opposed to consent of the governed.

When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.

The fact is, even the sciences and even more so, academia in general, still get caught up in the same feedback loops, of the older dictating to the younger and as theories solidify into doctrines, can only be patched, never falsified. As the saying goes, change happens one funeral at a time.

So simply putting up rationality, without a clear understanding of what it is, or how it really works, just replaces one form of faith with another.

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-western-mind-906dc73cffe2