Religion: a net plus, or a net minus?

I just read another article that wrestles with the question of whether religion is, overall, a positive or negative force in the world.  This is a question that can be argued about until the end of time.  Does "God is Love" or "Onward, Christian Soldiers" win out?  One thinks of all the charity given out by churches, their feeding and sheltering of the homeless; one puts the Inquisition and the Crusades on the other side of the balance.

All religions have their saints and their murderers.  In point of fact, religion gets its character from human nature.  My feeling is that, if there suddenly were no religion, the saintly and the murderous acts would continue unabated because these behaviors are human behaviors.

I think that, among the excuses for war, religion is very high on the list, but religion is only one of a number of things that humans fight ferociously over.  Economics, forms of government, questions of morality can all whip us into bouts of frenzy.  Now and then, people even kill each other over sports.  Religion may be one of the foremost excuses for violence, but we have plenty of others.

I don't think we get anywhere posing the question this way; the argument itself brings out the bellicosity in both sides.

That said, I come down on the net minus side, simply because religion deals in falsehoods, and if you're born in a religious family, it can take a long time to get out from under the mounds of misinformation.  But that's a different matter.