Surely if the placebo effect is the only potentially-verifiable positive benefit to a religion, we can get rid of all the rituals and the costumes, all the gold and iconography, all the magic and the worship and the chanting? All we need is the platitudes to those judged to be in need of them and let them work their own magic.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
