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nyan_sandwich comments on How to Not Lose an Argument - Less Wrong
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First off, you are confusing belief and knowledge. Belief is what you were talking about with the religion example; they produce belief. Knowledge is beliefs that match reality.
Knowledge has nothing to do with social power, and your science example has a better explanation. We believe the things published in journals and said by scientists because expert opinion is strongish evidence for truth. Hearsay is usually worthless because most people's beliefs are not formed by a causal entanglement process with reality. Science hearsay is produced by causal entanglement, so we take it as good evidence.
Most of what we know is based on doing the experiments ourselves. I didn't read the layout of my house from a science journal, I didn't read about the color of my socks from a science journal, I didn't learn how to make a good stew from a science journal. The only type of knowledge we get from academic science is general theories about how the processes of reality work, and that is a very small subset of knowledge. We learn about that stuff from academia instead of on our own because it is more efficient for one person to do the experiment and publish than for all of us to build particle accelerators in our backyards.
Your argument stinks of trying to get us to accept some definition of knowledge so you can use it for other purposes that we wouldn't agree with otherwise. Give up; jedi word tricks will not work on us. See 37 ways that words can be wrong.
In fairness, the question of what knowledge is is a rather subtle one: the Justified True Belief framework has certain problems. I'm personally inclined to dismiss that whole tangle of epistemological debate as hopelessly confused and just treat the word as referring to concept-clusters associated with strong evidence (and you seem to be doing something similar, if your second paragraph is anything to go by). That being said, though, all the standard senses of the word I'm aware of do seem to approach the idea of a reliable mapping between concepts and predictable reality from some angle.
That Gettier stuff looks like another place where non-bayesian epistemology goes off the rails.
We can forget about the philosophers' confusion, tho; We know enough about knowledge to say that religious belief is not knowledge because it doesn't match reality (and isn't produced by causal entanglement).