Lazy Atheism?

[Belacqua]

In the world as it currently exists, a lot of people motivate and structure their charity through religion. 

We could obviously imagine a world in which things work differently, but that would be counterfactual speculation. Maybe there could be other ways to do it, in scenarios that we would like better.

The point I was making is that people who work this way often don't need anything that you or I would consider proof.

The big question is why tie it to religion? Is it golden ticket? Is it esteem within the community? Can they not find self worth/fulfillment without religion?

These are questions for historians, anthropologists, sociologists. Why did society evolve this way and not another? It's a set of complicated questions.

We could speculate about an alternative universe in which there was no religion. Would there be more or less peace-love-and-understanding?

My completely unprovable instinct is that the amount of joy and suffering in a zero-religion world would be the same as the amount in a world with lots of religion. Religions often function as structures which people use to bring about the things they want to do anyway. Unfortunately to demonstrate the truth of this, we'd need a control group, and no such society has ever existed.