Is the catholic church a force for good?

[Esquilax]

If the atheist is allowed to invoke an accusation against the theist that the possibility of heaven is a theist's ''reward'' for laying down one's life, then the act of praying should be put back onto the table as a moral action that an atheist couldnt do.

If the atheist says heaven doesnt exist, then going to heaven cant be called a reward. And if praying isnt seen as a moral action because atheists say there is no One listening, then it falls into the same category.

Except that you believe that you will go to heaven, and that affects your actions. You live your life as a theist under the assumption that your death isn't permanent and that afterwards you'll spend eternity in paradise, especially if you do good things.

It's not so much a matter of the reward one gets, but of how the promise of that reward alters the motivations behind actions; the sacrifice a theist makes is necessarily less selfless because to them, the death they are going to isn't permanent, and the life they are giving up was only a pit stop on the way to something greater, anyway.

By contrast, the atheist is giving up everything when they sacrifice themselves. It's a question of motivation, not reward; either one of us could die and discover that we were wrong about our beliefs, that doesn't invalidate the thought experiment entirely. Neither of us can say anything conclusive about the actual reward, only about the motivations one has in the real world.