Hi Psychotropic,
With due respect, I think you have not understood the complete meaning of my post. I think this has in part to do with how you and I think about religion. I assume you take religion as manifested by today's scenarios, where some self-made "Godmen" try to subjugate the will of people, promising God (a human-personified Superbeing) will take care of them, if they kneel blindly before him. If that is your definition, then I am completely with you and I abhor it as much as you do. However, my view of Religion is broader than this. I think of it as a system that helps humans find peace, purpose and meaning in this turmoil we call Life. And Religion is a system of social thinking which has studied human behaviour en masse for a long time and come up with rules of behaviour which best harmonise society as a whole and drive it forward. That is the broader view of Religion that is exemplified when you read the Gita (or various interpretations of it). I believe the same would be true of Christ's teachings and all successful world religions as well.
Having said that, I will try to answer your points below:
Firstly you point out instances of scientists being unscientific and claim that this somehow exposes flaws in the scientific approach. But it would take a rather generous leap of the imagination to then conclude that the scientific method was false.
No, I do not claim that the scientific method is false. It is a method, one cannot ascribe truth or falsehood to it. What I have given instances of are "rational, scientific" men, who behaved irrationally and unscientifically, when their hypotheses were questioned. Which means that the scientific method (which I broadly called Science in my post) cannot enforce its disciples to behave scientifically. And that all scientific men are not logical all the time. I put this point because I read some posts (or their tone) exhalting the virtues of logical and rational thinking rather religiously(if I may use the word in this context) , as a panacea to all problems in the world. All I wanted to point out was that it is not. Because scientists are human, first and foremost. I have great respect for Science and use it in my work everyday. I am also open to its limitations.
Secondly you claim science is man made. That really makes no sense. Science is a method, an approach, a search for truth. That approach to finding the truth I agree was man made, but not the events, things and the phenomena that science studies.
You have just answered your own query in this sentence. Science is man-made, by which I mean the 'scientific method/approach'. The models which Science uses to describe phenomena are man-made. The real-number line is man-made. Probability theory is man-made. Calculus is man-made. Every foundational tool in Mathematics and Science is man-made. Even today, the meaning of a limit is not understood by many 'logical' thinkers, because it is an extremely non-intuitive concept. At the end, one has to just "feel"...Scientists sometimes call this "intuition". I feel it is another name for a belief... a belief which may have come after studying things over time, but a belief nonetheless. And no different from beliefs that (what you call) religionists have.
I say this from my own experience studying many theorems in Science/Engineering, where the final insight came when i stopped thinking and started "feeling" what the mathematics was telling me. And all mathematics is incomplete because the foundational axioms which any theory is based on are "self-evident truths". Self-evident to whom? I can tell you from personal experience that many of them are not so self-evident! In set theory, axioms sometimes contradict each other. And so men split up the system into objects which obey these "laws" and those which don't.
Godel's hypothesis states that any reasonably complex mathematical system cannot derive it's own axioms and there may be other results which are not derivable using just the rules of inference. In that sense, all mathematics is incomplete. This was a major blow to Hilbert's( I think) program of using pure logic to derive all the relations of the world. Measure theory is another instance of this. Georg Cantor went mad (literally) because he spent his life trying to quantify "infinities" and the leap of imagination required to do this made him fearful of the enormity of the Universe and finally seclusion and madness. Here is a link to a very interesting history of this, a documentary called Dangerous Knowledge:
Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics - ?Dangerous Knowledge?
I just don't see how it holds so much relevance in these times when we have far better and demonstrable explanations for these phenomena. This is precisely the problem. This search for 'meaning'
I will answer this in a separate post so that this one doesn't get too long to read.
And to respond to Vivekananda's quote, it is the currents and the winds that guide the ships (i presume he is talking about sailing ships, if not it is the steam engines that are guiding them), and this is perfectly explainable by science. Even the people who sailed those ships didn't think those ships were being guided by anything supernatural. I am baffled at what he thought the 'east' was contributing to the winds, the currents, or the steam engine. Let me reiterate I am not disrespecting Vivekananda, just pointing out a rather obvious flaw with his statement.
I think you are taking the literal meaning of this quote without reflecting on the metaphor that he was trying to convey. The ship is a metaphor for the engineering and technical prowess of the West at that time. The East refers to the philosophies and practices of Vedanta/Hinduism that would give direction to all the technological marvels the West was creating. I am not that naive and I am sure Vivekananda was not that foolish to think that the Eastern countries cause winds and weather changes around the world, nor that they somehow provided motive force to actual ships.

I have paraphrased from memory so it is possible Vivekananda's original statement was more concise and clearer. For that, I apologise for any confusion it may have caused.
Thanks for your interesting and pertinent observations.
-Ajinkya.