Depends on what connotations of relgion you mean. But ensuring ulturally that the scientific process doesn't stop - and provides value by forming a religion-like commuity around it does sound like a viable way.
Reminds me of the approach proposed for warning of radioactive waste dumps for 10000 years:
Bastide and Fabbri came to the conclusion that the most durable thing that humanity has ever made is culture: religion, folklore, belief systems. They may morph over time, but an essential message can get pulled through over millennia.
Not a good analogy. Something that works and reliably gives its users comparative advantage (such as science) shouldn't need a mechanism to keep alive an "essential message". Institutions to teach it, and to keep it clean, yes: but those are universities, not religions.
And universities, once established, also tend to be extremely durable. They just haven't been around for thousands of years yet. But while they have, many more newly-founded religions than universities have died.
Yesterday I attended church service in Romania where I had visited my sister and the sermon was about the four things a (christian) community has to follow to persevere and grow.
I first considered just posting the quote from the Acts of the Apostles (reproduced below) in the Rationality Quotes Thread but I fear without explanation the inferential gap of the quote is too large.
The LessWrong Meetups, the EA community and other rationalist communities probably can learn from the experience of long established orders (I once asked for lessons from free masonry).
So I drew the following connections:
According to the the sermon and the below verse the four pillars of a christian community are:
Other analogies that I drew from the quote:
And what I just right now notice is that embedding the rules in the scripture is essentially self-reference. As the scripture is canon this structure perpetuates itself. Clearly a meme that ensures its reproduction.
Does this sound convincing and plausible or did I fell trap to some bias in (over)interpreting the sermon?
I hope this is upvoted for the lessons we might draw from this - despite the quote clearly being theistic in origin.