Did religion ever bring anything to mankind?

[DetlefK]

51. I'm an atheist, but I think that religion has upsides.

It's a great instrument for crowd-control. You have to imagine living in a primitive time where people die all the time, sometimes in cruel, shocking ways. (How many of your relatives were eaten by wolves or beaten to death by a gang of marauders?)

1. Religion brings hope and counter-acts grief by creating a new reality in your mind.
In reality, there are situations where the only rational conclusion is to give up. But in your religious mind, there are irrational conlusions that allow you to keep going, eventually maybe exploiting extremely improbable events, also known as "miracles".

2. Religion allows the smart to control the dumb. (Exploiting the appeal-to-authority fallacy.)
Imagine if you had to reason with every peasant "No, you shouldn't breed pigs here in the Middle-East! Pigs need mud, mud needs water and we don't have much water around here! If you breed pigs, you will deplete the community's water-ressources!"
"No, you can't screw around with other people's wives! This will create jealousy and this will create violence, threatening the stability of our community! And it would lead the concept of marriage ad absurdum which we just invented to regulate heritage."
It's way easier to use religion: "No pigs because God said so. No fucking around because God said so."