Organized religion should be distinguished from private religion definitionally for the sake of this prompt. We also need to emphasize "Net Negative." This does not deny that organized religion can do good. It is, however a NET negative. Religion that is organized moves as a unit, controls the beliefs and shapes the political opinions of its adherents, and thereby influences larger societies political outcomes, imposed by a belief system not shared by the others in that society. Organized religion has the power to reaffirm and strenghen the biases of that belief system against others, is prone to an us vs them mindset that weakens societal structures, and creates needless conflict and friction in places like schools and local policy. In the extreme cases, depending on the religion, it can be outright tyrranical or murderous, as history has shown us many times. You see, the term religion is itself agnostic, it does not tell you which religion. It does not distinguish from Good religion helps their neighbor, or other religions that kill unbelievers or wallow in feces. Without specificity, we must lump all of the crazy the religious world has to offer into one pot, all the terrors and horrors it has wrought, and compare it to the benefit of the good that a believer might do, WHICH IS STILL POSSIBLE in a private, unorganized fashion. Therefore, one can do good, and have the benefits of religion, without it being Organized. The Negative comes from the organization of the system, and so if the Good can be ascribed to the individual and the bad ascribed to the Organized principle, the way it balances out is that the NET that remains in ORGANIZED religion is negative.

My opponent is obviously arguing from a western Christian paradigm, but we are talking as a general principle of ALL religion. The good things that my opponent mentioned can be accomplished by religious individuals, but Organized religion has brought us religious wars, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, sharia oppression of women, child brides, hindu feces festivals. Human sacrifice has been part of many civilizations across time. Animal sacrifices genocides livestock on mass scale. These are historic, yes, but the prompt is not timebound, but is merely talking about "society" and "religion".. so my opponent cannot restrict this to simply a modern favorable, civilized christian religion of good works. It entails organized religion in all of its manifestations.

My opponent actually has returned us to The prompt of NET benefit. When determining net benefit of organized religion, one has to conceptually subtract the benefit of private religion that would still occur otherwise. And then further subtract the negatives which I have already outlined. My opponent seems to want to over emphasize the impact of soup kitchens and reduce the impact of the murder of tens of thousands, child marriage, female genital mutilations and countless other ills done in the name of religion. This is not even considering the religious fraud that occurs in the name of philanthropy, televangelists that harvest millions of dollars from their listeners to buy private jets etc. how many people's lives are worth a trip to the soup kitchen in the balance? When you add everything up proportionally, all of the benefit of organized religion, subtract the benefit that private believers would have otherwise and then subtract the tremendous toll in human life, limitation of intellect science progress and society, not from just a benevolent Christian centric enlightenment paradigm, but from religion across all sectors all cultures and all times, the answer is clear and it's not even close.