Religions may outsource opinions on morality, but no one went to their spiritual leader to ask about the Pythagorean theorem or the population of Zimbabwe.

Well, now, that's not actually true:

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoreanism/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia

Obviously I was using the Pythagorean theorem as a random not literal example. But I’m also curious about what you mean. Mind linking to the specific relevant parts? Linking to humongous articles doesn’t help much.

I was linking it partially tongue in cheek, but oracles and the auspices in antiquity were specifically not about morality. They were about predicting the future. If you wanted to know if you should invade Carthage on a certain day, you'd check the chickens. Literally. And plenty of medical practices were steeped in religious fare, too. If you go back further, a lot of shamanistic practices divine the facts about the present reality. In the words of Terrence McKenna, "[Shamans] cure disease (and another way of putting that is: they have a remarkable facility for choosing patients who will recover), they predict weather (very important), they tell where game has gone, the movement of game, and they seem to have a paranormal ability to look into questions, as I mentioned, who’s sleeping with who, who stole the chicken, who—you know, social transgressions are an open book to them." All very much dealing with facts, not morality.

With regards to Pythagoreanism, Pythagoras himself thought of mathematics in religious ways. From the entry on Pythagoras (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/) in the SEP:

> The cosmos of the acusmata, however, clearly shows a belief in a world structured according to mathematics, and some of the evidence for this belief may have been drawn from genuine mathematical truths such as those embodied in the “Pythagorean” theorem and the relation of whole number ratios to musical concords.

There are numerous sections throughout both of these entries that discuss Pythagoras, mathematics, and religion. Plato too is another fruitful avenue, if you wanted to explore that further.

That’s a bit cynical. Religion is more like a technology. It was continuously invented to solve problems and increase capacity. Newer religions superseded older and survived based on productive and coercive supremacy.

If religion is a technology, it's inarguably one that prevented the development of a lot of other technologies for long periods of time. Whether that was a good thing is open to interpretation.

On the other hand it produced a lot of related technology. Calendars, mathematics, writing, agricultural practices, government and economic systems. Most of this stuff emerged as an effort to document and proliferate spiritual ideas.

I see your point, but I'd say religion's main technological purpose is as a storage system for the encoding of other technologies (and social patterns) into rituals, the reasons for which don't need to be understood; to the point that it actively discourages examination of their reasons, as what we could call an error-checking protocol. So a religion tends to freeze those technologies in the time at the point of inception, and to treat any reexamining of them as heresy. Calendars are useful for iron age farming, but you can't get past a certain point as a civilization if you're unwilling to reconsider your position that the sun and stars revolve around the earth, for example.

This is ahistorical, whiggish nonsense. The actual world is not a game of Civilization II.

Eh? I was talking about Galileo's trial for heresy.

Then you also understand nothing about Galileo.

I think it is hard to fully remove religious practice from species. I think it exist along a spectrum and that there are base ritualistic behaviors most animals engage with (e.g. a pets ritual around eating or play), organized social order sort of rituals (e.g. birds expecting a particular mating dance performed well and this sensibility shared among the local group of birds), and finally what we observe in our own development as a species, higher religion, but that is merely iteratively developed from layering these simple behaviors onto simple behaviors until the whole is quite elaborate in fact.

In that sense I think getting caught up in “religion bad for tech” zeitgeist misses the point of what religion actually is. Collectively shared ritual. Belief in God, and specific shades of that, is just the step of the dance the bird does in this case. Taking a step back, plenty of atheists engage in collectively shared ritual too. Belief in the 9-5, the bludgeon that is the four years to specialize vs lifelong apprentanceships towards true mastery, economics constraining choice rather than pure skill. Do these rituals not also hold our species and technological development back? If we talk about religion, it is worth also considering the mountain of other blockers towards progress we have built for ourselves in this collectively agreed upon daily society ritual we all partake upon.