Nice that you came back and gave context. Very interesting. One comment (of course...)

I understand your point about science developing as an antidote to whatever dogmatic religious thought prevailed at a given time. One phrase caught my eye:

"...if, instead of being anti-Anything, science had simply arisen without that need to first discard something else..."

I think I know what you are saying, but as a matter of course, science is the very process of discarding previous ideas. In the old days, there was no difference between a priest (or some other rare learned person) and a scientist. So, the progress of science involved discarding previous ideas that were (at the time) thought of as inherently religious. Only very recently (couple hundred years?) have we separated scientists from religious people.