Is religion the best proven business model for success?

[Anomalocaris]

Not sure it is the most nonproductive industry in human history.  Catholic Monks and nuns sometimes grew their own food, ran their own crafts and industry, and copied non-religious manuscripts. Catholic Church actually runs a world class astronomical observatory in Arizona from which respectable scientific papers emanate...

All this? After 1,200 years of almost total domination of Europe and unlimited resources. Seems like a poor return on investment to me. What did they invent in all those years, what did they discover, what did they write. What did they produce?

They produced nothing!

Some decent architecture, some decent art, back when science and historic scholarship were in their infancies and an overly self confident church actually believed in its own bullshit and thought science and scholarship would help it gild its own lilies, It patronized science and scholarship.  The church certainly had some aspect of nonproductive monasticism, but on the whole it didn’t preach salvation came through nonproductivity, even for its own clergy.

All in all, at various times it had been both a source of and a drag on progress.  It might be argued that in recent centuries it was far more drag than source, but I am not certain I would claim that starting from 476 AD, an ulternative western world that didn’t have the unifying and preservative influence of the Catholic Church through the 14th or 15th century would have been ahead of where it actually is today.

Buddhism actually seems have more consistently preached the highest and truest enlightenment can only come through nonproductivity, and thus doctrinally to be enlightened is to be parasitic, not just the actuality of those peddling enlightenment are in reality parasitic. So it’s clergy is forbidden from anything that even smelled of productivity. How big of a help can such a creed be to human and social progress?