Considering the wars, arguments and division that stem from religion, and also conversely the love and moral lessons, would you say religion was good or bad for the world?

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Religion has, and will always be, an unmitigated source of good in the world.

Let me start by saying that it has only been recently that people have had the ability to be free of religion. Civilization was built by extremely religious people, religion is what gave them the notion that they could rise above primitive hunter-gatherers / farmers.

People say that religion is what controls, but historically, the opposite has always been the case. Religion was used as a tool of the poor, oppressed, and downtrodden as a form of forcing morality and justice onto the ruling class. When the depredations got too serious, mobs used the language and forms of religion to demand a reckoning.

The ancient Romans had a practice called sessecio plebis where the plebians, the worker class, would simply walk away from society if they got sufficiently pissed off about what the patricians were doing. Imagine being a rich person and having no servants to clean your house or farmers to grow your food. The prospect was so scary you’d do anything to avoid it.

Roman plebians, when they could credibly do so, used the threat of a sessecio to ram civic reforms down the throat of the rulers, including the ancient precursor to our modern Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the Lex Hortensia, which gave the resolutions of the plebian representative body actual legal teeth.

I’m not trying to say that this is a religious practice or that the demands were religious in nature, but rather to illustrate that the purported control the ruling classes of history had over the common people has always been rather tenuous. Many many concessions had to be given to the common people, and one of those concessions was the demand for rulers to be spiritually righteous.

Don’t get me wrong, rulers didn’t give two whits about the mob’s religion. But it made practical sense for them to at least pay lip service to these beliefs that the masses had about themselves and their places in the world order. Naturally, rulers would do their best to try to portray themselves as unassailable agents of divinity, but the illusion only lasted as long as their accomplishments did. Many an ancient king lost their heads when their divine boasts went unjustified on the battlefield.

What changed this perception of religion was Christianity. The Christian Church was a massively successful project that sought to attain not just spiritual domain, but also political domain as well, to have lands and subjects and a mandate to rule. People nowadays only care to see the Church’s failures, but for a very long time, kings had to answer to God, through His representatives the Church.

If you really read the Bible, to get a sense for its rhythm, story line, and narrative elements, and get a sense for the following history of Europe, it’s hard to not come away with the conviction that while the Bible’s historical accuracy is every bit as flawed as you would expect it to be, Leviathans and firmament and big boats with literally every species of animal on board aside, its allegorical truths simply cannot be argued with. But the truth of the religion is not the focus of this answer.

The focus is simple, Christianity had a truly pivotal role in the creation of the modern world. Rome had amazing military might, but when it comes to ancient power projection in the geopolitical sense, soft power is more important than judicious use of hard power. And Rome was willing to invest heavily in soft power, the primary vehicle of which being Roman Catholicism. Rome’s edge over the ancient agrarian kingdoms simply could not have been maintained without it.

Christianity was the religion built to spread, a truly novel innovation that has only been imitated, never copied, not even by its great offshoot, Islam. The huge basilicas, later cathedrals, could not have been anything other than utterly mind-blowing to conquered peoples, nearly as inspirational as Egypt’s pyramids, again religiously-inspired, must have been.

Roman Catholicism overtook Europe, and helped to tame the dark lawlessness that came after the Empire fell. Being humans, we only tend to see the negatives, never the truly overwhelming positives we’d see if we were truly objective.