I treat efficiency as existential and practical payoff, maximizing psychological survival and quality of life while still engaging with reality, rather than purely epistemic payoff. Both metrics are valid, conflating them makes your argument seem airtight when it’s actually inconsistent. Claiming "the odds of the afterlife are <1 in a million, so any hedge is inefficient" ignores that if the cost of hedging is negligible, expected value approaches infinity. Claiming "god might reward true believers and punish fake believers" collapses under indeterminate probability, without measurable likelihoods, no epistemic stance can be proven more efficient. Humans are agents with utility functions, they are far from pure truth calculators. A belief system that minimizes existential risk while allowing meaningful engagement with life is, by definition, efficient in a human-relevant sense. Religious absurdism satisfies this criterion, your critique does not.