The destination is irrelevant, we don’t even know that there is any great destination, but that shouldn’t matter.
It all goes back to how Religion/Spirituality, at one point, was deemed as a necessity to achieve self-actualization.
For example, I’m first going to posit that a non-zero number of people, dare I say most people, have a desire to be fundamentally good. If not a desire to actually be good, then at a minimum, a desire to be perceived by others as being good. When religious indoctrination was all the rage, people were taught that if you didn’t subscribe to the teachings of a Religion, worse still if you didn’t believe in it at all, you could not be a good person.
Religion and morality, the most familiar example for people that read this being most God of Abraham based denominations, were perceived as being completely hand in hand with one another. In order to be, “Good,” one had to believe in God. In order to be moral, not only did one have to believe in God, but one also had to subscribe to a fundamental moral code as described in the Bible. Without God, there was no good. You could theoretically be redeemed, but that failing, it was essentially drilled into you that it would be impossible to be a moral person. Primarily because to be moral necessitated a faith that the person did not possess.
Atheism, Agnosticism, other Religions, all stigmatic.
What we have learned since by more readily being able to confer with individuals outside of whatever Religion we may (or in some cases not) have been exposed to is that we perceive some people as fundamentally good, fundamentally moral, despite their absence of Religious conviction. Again, this is owing to a more efficient means of education and communication. Also, you no longer have to worry about the social stigma that would have once gone hand in hand with conferring with someone seen as a heretic. That’s especially true of the electronic medium, because nobody actually sees you talking to them.
As far as the, “Filling of one’s stomach,” I think that can come as a result of determining that morality and the living of a good life are not mutually exclusive with being of a particular Religion, or any at all. When people have weighed the options freely, without social pressure and have arrived at a decision on their own (right or wrong) Religion then serves as a benefit in the journey towards self-actualization. For some people, Religion and that journey go hand-in-hand. For others, now that the social stigma is gone, many determine that they can live a, “Good life,” and behave in a way that they consider morally acceptable even completely without Religion/Spirituality. For them, Religion has nothing to do with the journey towards self-actualization, neither as a benefit or detriment, just an irrelevancy.