Knowing the Truth

I HAVE OFTEN WONDERED how any organized religions there are in the world, and have consulted numerous sources to discern the answer. Finally, unsatisfied, I settled for Google and Wikipedia,which tells me that the number is roughly four thousand two hundred. Fair enough. IN other words, nobody knows. No matter how assiduously the number is counted, there will doubtless be later found some obscure but thriving religious tradition in some remote corner of the four cornered world. How many of them are populated by votaries who are willing to swer on their scripture that there's and only there's is the one true religion, available and applicable to all? The answer is; the same number as the number of organized religions on Earth. All this profound thinking on my part was undertaken with renewed vigor with the most recent war between Islamic Palestine and Judaic Israel. I first became aware of the palestinina-Israeli problem in 1967, when I was twelve,and I believe it was Egypt an Syria,among others, who attacked Israel and, as always, were soundly defeated, with massive military support from the imperialistic west. That was only twenty years after the establishment of Israel as a nation state. since then, little has changed. It has been suggested by economic historians that all wars are fought over mineral resources; namely, land. Arguably true, but it cannot escape notice that in many cases the warring parties are divided by religion. It has often been said that science is nothing other than another form of religion, that is is as dependant on faith as any religion on Earth. Although that assertion is highly questionable, there is at least an element of truth to it. Science is founded on the faith that the world, the universe is knowable, that humans have the capacity to understand and know the universe through observation and reason, and that whenever new knowledge is discovered, once it is verified repeatedly and independently, it remains, and ecome beyond question. I would suggest that the opposite is true; that religion is a form of science, a very primitive form, but a form nonetheless. Every religion offers an explanation concerning how the world was made, and how it functions, how nature functions. Every religion has a unique explanation for the existence of human beings and the universe,, but most of thee have certain similarities. Every religio postulates the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, supreme, superior being, the creator of the cosmos. Science emerged from religion as an attempt to explain human existence, and the existence of nature itself. Accepting the notion that science is nothing other than another form of religion, so be it; science is the most informative religion yet invented. It does a much better job of explaining the universe than any other religion, primarily because it contains one feature lacking in all other religions; it is self correcting, self improving, willing to change itself when confronted with new evidence and knowledge. This thus stipulated, perhaps we should consider the possibility that humanity has, after centuries of striving, finally invented, or "discovered" the one true religion: science. Science, like most religions, was invented thousands of years ago, perhaps by the ancient Greeks, perhaps by the ancient Mesopotamians, perhaps in ancient India or Arabia, when people first looked at the stars and wondered what they are. With the passage of time, as humanity plunges intrepidly into the heart of the twenty first century, it seems to be the religion of science which offers the most verifiably accurate version of reality. As science advances and continues to improve itself, all other forms of religion, all forty two hundred of them, are being left, as it were, in the dust.