Did religion ever bring anything to mankind?

[Yorktown]

171. OK: the correlation religion and crime is inconclusive at best

I stand corrected, you did produce studies claiming a negative correlation between religiosity and criminality.

Alas, it is far from enough to demonstrate that religion produces more good than evil from a demonstrable measurement of violence:

1- because of the studies proving the reverse or no religion/crime correlation

reverse correlation
* Gregory S. Paul (2005) argued for a positive correlation between the degree of public religiosity in a society and certain measures of dysfunction (in Journal of Religion and Society)
* Phil Zuckerman (2008) "the least religious countries in the world, and possibly in the history of the world", enjoy "among the lowest violent crime rates in the world [and] the lowest levels of corruption in the world". (in Society without God)
* UC Berkeley (2012) non-religious people had higher scores showing that they were more inclined to show generosity in random acts of kindness (Social Psychological and Personality Science Journal)

no correlation
* your abstract quotes Hirschi and Stark's (1969) failure to find religious effects on delinquency
* Brent Benda (1997) concluded that there were no statistically significant negative correlations between religiosity and crime http://jrc.sagepub.com/content/34/2/163
* Phil Zuckerman (2009) not enough data to indicate any correlation between religiosity, secularism, and crime. http://www.pitzer.edu/academics/faculty/zuckerman/Zuckerman_on_Atheism.pdf

2- Because religion negates certain crimes are such

In the studies above, only crimes universally accepted as crimes or substance abuse are counted. Straightforward enough: crimes per inhabitant, grams of pure alcohol, etc.

How about other 'crimes' invented by religion? How many homosexuals stoned to death or hanged? Honor killings? Are you aware that under Sharia Law, it is NOT a crime to kill someone for apostasy? Such murders do happen and never make it in the statistics. Better still, rejecting such crimes is only a minority view in largely populated countries

In Bangladesh, fewer than four-in-ten Muslims reject honor killings for women (34%) and men (38%), while in Afghanistan roughly a quarter say executing a woman (24%) or a man (24%) is never justified.

3- Then, in memoriam, you have all the killings in the conquests of conversion

In Europe, it lasted for about one millenium, form the Franks to the 30 years war.
In Islam, about as long, from muhamad to Vienna II. And it's restarting.



But I will do penance. My wording was loose. I think people of good 'faith' could settle on:

No conclusive link between religion and morality can be demonstrated

(and that's being nice, not counting the wars of religious conquest)

Therefore, back to my OP question: what demonstable good did religion bring to the world?