My opinion is that on balance religions have done more good than harm. First and foremost, they have met the needs of their members for a sense of community and of belonging.

Then, there’s the cultivation of mankind’s deep awe and curiosity about the metaphysical questions of existence. Even when religious doctrines are wrong and off-base, they still tend to nurture the religious impulse and give value to life. I think that without religion there’d never have been science.

Also, religions have promoted upright, moral behavior, a benefit to any society, and in addition they have provided schools, welfare, hospitals, etc.

Just about every society that survived long has had religion of some sort. It’s survival of the fittest, that is to say, evolution at work.

There's not a good answer here in my opinion.

If you look at those good works, they are funded by good people who happen to be religious. Religions convince them that they would be greedy, deceitful, rapists and murderers without god. The fact is that those people who believe that they cannot be good without god really are, they just don't know it.

On the other hand religion gives people license to do the most vile shit in god's name. While some people would do those things anyway. The horror of religion is that it can convince good people that atrocities are acceptable or at least necessary.

It is the nature of religions to degrade its own followers until they obey out of fear and think its love. This is similar to the relationship between abusers and their victims.

You fail to recognize that all those "good works" are influence gathering and tools to manipulate large numbers of people. Religion is at it's heart nothing more than a way to control the masses. Your rose colored glasses don't change whats real it just makes you feel better about the evil you deny.

Well, to me all religions are at the heart of both killing and generating the summits of human artistic and scientific achievements. Alchemy was the search for god-like powers and it produced modern day science. The spread of Islam brought us maths and astronomy. Then again we have had scientists persecuted and knowledge suppressed ruthlessly by religion. There would never have been the empires of the Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds with their richness of art and philosophy without gods/a god at the center of their society. So overall, I am with you, Matias: on the grand scale all good and bad is equalized.

Without religion, peple might still have been inclined to found hospitals and orphanages and do other good works. Whe religion does it it is more public relations than out of a desire to go good.