>The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for...)

>Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." From a Bayesian perspective that's some darned unambiguous evidence of a superhumanly powerful entity... The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference.

That's not right. It's language is... well, language. Including, but not limited to, mathematics.

> Religion wonders about the ultimate meaning of such models. Its language is philosophy.

I don't think this is really being fair to philosophy. I do view religion as a kind of proto-philosophy. Philosophy is what religion should have been.

Your mistake is in claiming that religion is about 'meaning' where science and mathematics aren't. Anywhere you use language, you study meaning. Meaning is a feature of language, and religion tends to use the least reliable and most inconsistent language of any of those subjects. If religion is a search for meaning, it is an incredibly stupid way of doing so.

So the one thing you've claimed it is useful for is something that it is demonstrably bad at.

Ps: The have been a lot of tiny or dead religions some of which where vary odd by modern standards. But, if you limit yourself to religions with say 20,000,000+ followers today then clearly there going to need to be able to spread.