Would the world and people be better off without any religion?
What would be better?
What would be worse?
The world would be better off without organized, politicized religion.
I don't see where anything would be worse if people could learn to live without religion, but that would mostly be to their benefit, not the unbeliever's. What benefit is that? Religious belief often impedes moral and intellectual development. Too often, the believer is left in a more undeveloped state of magical thinking of being continually watched and judged. He lets others dictate moral values to him and often uncritically accepts immoral ideas such as the persecution of LGBTQ as moral.
He learns that faith is a virtue and that the cognitive dissonance of reason questioning irrational ideas is the devil trying to steal his soul, leading him on a path in which critical thinking, higher education, and science are often disesteemed. This is especially harmful to the adherent, and predisposes him to a lifetime of susceptibility to indoctrination for having never developed the defense against it, often unaware that there is another and more useful way of thinking. We saw this with the anti-vaxxers. That wasn't a religious issue, but faith in gods is practice for faith in anything else. Being told that faith is superior to reason predisposed people to listen to crackpots over experts, and impaired their ability to understand the death by vaccination status data. We all suffer when others are defenseless against indoctrination or take anti-science attitudes.
The believer also often learns that the universe is fit for destruction, that his body is vile flesh temporarily housing a soul, and to be uninvolved in his world. This last idea hurts everybody.
And he is often encouraged to maintain the mindset of a dependent child or subject rather than that of an autonomous citizen.
I see the removal of all of that from society to be a plus.
Most all religious people have hope. Getting rid of religion gets rid of their hope.
Vulnerable people (starving, powerless, in danger) will continue to pray for protection with or without religions, and it probably helps them to do so. But for people whose lives are stable enough that atheism is a tenable option, growing up outside of religion is a better path. In such settings, religion creates the need for itself by preventing maturation without it. The unbeliever has assimilated that there may be no god or afterlife, that there may be nobody protecting us or answering prayer, that man may be the only source of moral intuitions, etc.. He doesn't need religion for hope.
However there are religious groups such as St Jude's that do wonders for people. Without religion would others step up and do the same?
Did you see the church's response to the need during the pandemic? Religion does almost nothing compared to government. I was a medical resident in a Catholic hospital. We did not accept the uninsured who were stable for transport to the county hospital.
I live in a Catholic country now. Our village has a Catholic church. Money goes one way. Poor people are giving it to a wealthy institution that does nothing for the community and it appears spends nothing on its adherents, either.
St. Jude's was principally the vision of a single man. There is no reason to believe that he needed religion to care about children with medical needs. Does the church contribute to this charity that it seems to be getting credit for here?
And in the area of private charity, the most important entities are secular, like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, the Red Cross, the ASPCA, and Doctors Without Borders.
