Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden for the sin of seeking knowledge; or more specifically, they were punished for wanting to know and be more like their Dad. So it makes sense that religion would be designed to maintain human ignorance, which is why it uses "beliefs" as a means of punishing us all for the "sin" of seeking such knowledge, even as it only claims to offer us such knowledge.
We see this in every attempt by Christians to assert some claim to a Bible full of "sacred knowledge," which they claim explains everything from the origin of the universe and the world, to the nature of love and sex, and from the nature of our souls to God's policing of our every thought. The Bible, in other words, is believed by Christians to offer all of humanity the very thing that the Devil promised Adam and Eve would receive from eating the "forbidden fruit."
That the Christian believes it is their God given duty to interpret every speck of evidence humanity has ever uncovered, during its life long investigation of its own species and everything else within the universe it inhabits, including the universe itself, as always only ever confirming the sacred "beliefs" found in a Bible that we alone authored only a handful of years ago, is to either worship human ignorance and fear as its greatest God, or to pretend that those who wrote such a book, possessed all the omniscience of God.
To believe the Bible is the word of God, in other words, is to necessarily believe that the Biblical authors had indeed "become like God, knowing good from evil," exactly as the serpent in the Garden had promised Adam & Eve.
No wonder that it is that Bible, and indeed all the religions that are derived from it, that has been the greatest stumbling block of all human progress and knowledge, as it has only ever been used to force all of human understanding to conform to its dictates, and often been used as the sole justification for putting to death any who dared to question its "truths" or its authority, including Jesus himself. Again, it is to assume those who wrote it had received the fruits of the very promise the serpent made to Adam and Eve, and for which Adam and Eve, and all of humanity, where subsequently punished for seeking.
Hence it is only in the most Orwellian sense that "religion" could ever be said to be a pursuit of "knowledge," since it was exclusively that pursuit which constituted the very sin that led to everything from the fall of man, to the "great flood" of Noah, to the execution of a god-man named Jesus, and allegedly every "evil" that has ever occurred throughout history.
Or to put it another way, for the great sin of seeking knowledge by Adam and Eve, the grave punishment that God sought to impose upon humanity forever after, was institutional religion, which was as man made as the cross upon which Christ was crucified. Indeed, claiming that institutional religion is as natural as God is like claiming a cross is as natural as a tree.
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