Exactly. The entire discussion is speculative, since the question of comparison features comparing historical reality with a baseless fantasy alternative which can be chosen for any desired outcome.
But not every “religion” requires a belief in a magical being. Buddhism doesn’t. And i don’t think magical beings are terribly important to Confucianism, either. That’s why i suggested that “Communism” is a religion. It’s not one that refers to a god, but i think that may be an “Abrahamic-centric” view of religion.
While technically correct, referring to a world without a metaphysical religious influence on society as " a baseless fantasy alternative" just sounds weird to me. 
I thought the way the word “religion” was used in the original quote and in the OP would make it clear that an organized religion involving the metaphysical was implied. Sorry for not being specific enough.
Religion sprang from fear and ignorance. Fear of the unknown, such as what happens when I die, and ignorance of the natural world, such as why did the wind, fire, and water coming from the sky destroy my village?
People wanted answers, and since science didn’t exist, their leaders created supernatural beings or gods that controlled everything, and that answered their questions. If you prayed to them and gave them sacrifices your life would be good and you would be justly rewarded in the afterlife. If you didn’t abide by them, your life would be miserable and you were damned to some kind of hell after death. Since people were ignorant, they went along with this and prayed to these gods as if they really existed, even though praying and sacrificing didn’t seem to make any difference to the outcome.
Whether society could have been successful without any kind of religious belief is an untested hypothesis. People would probably have gotten tired of hearing their leaders continually saying “we don’t know”.
You might say that religion was the original “elephant charm”.
Whether or not humanity as a whole would benefit, European society would definitely not have been as successful without religion. There was a good few centuries there (during the early/mid middle ages) where the only people reading, writing, preserving ancient manuscripts, and maintaining Europe-wide communications and culture was the church.
There is no way the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, etc. happens in Europe without the church
Maybe other cultures had similar periods too, that aren’t as well known in the West
On the other hand, perhaps it would have influenced more people to seek real answers instead of accepting what the priests said at face value. Less “I don’t know”, and more “I don’t know yet”.
The church controlled all those aspects for the most part. Who got to learn reading, writing and math and science for the most part was controlled by the church.
Without understanding the Scientific Method it would be hard to imagine how anybody could “seek real answers” before the Renaissance. It would have been so much easier to go along with the crowd and believe whatever they were being told by their religious leaders. In fact, it would probably have been dangerous to challenge it.
As smart as the ancient Greeks were, they still had their Pantheons to the gods, which the majority of Greeks continued to believe in, at least in public.
How do we know this? Or is it a “just so” story made up to explain where religion came from?
Since nobody is around who was around back then we can’t possibly know for certain. It’s a logical premise based on human nature. I believe to this day there are primitive tribes that pray to gods because they don’t know any different.
I guess what I am trying to say is that a lot of advancements came from the church because the had to come from the church.
I think you’re make a value judgement here. You could also say religion sprang from curiosity and creativity. Curiosity of the unknown, and the creativity to imagine what it might be.
Right; and by this view we could treat Liberalism (as in, the idea that human beings are intrinsically valuable and have liberties that should be protected- the belief system that much of the modern world operates under) as another “Religion”.
Or perhaps a better way to think of it is to recognize that in the premodern world, religions and ideologies were tighly wound, to the point of basically being the same thing.
The church controlled them as they were the only ones doing anything like that. The educated literate secular upper/middle classes that did all those things previously just didn’t exist anymore (either because they literally didn’t exist anymore or were no longer literate an interested in doing those things). IMO there is no indication that if the church didn’t exist anyone else in society could have taken over those things and they would have just stopped happening in Western Europe.
As has been pointed out, there is no indication either way, just an assumption that because it happened that way, that way was the only way it could have happened.
Except for the fact that is what usually happens. When a great empire supporting sophisticated literary culture collapses into tiny feuding fiefdoms, the usually that culture is lost. Without evidence to the contrary I think it’s safe to assume they would have happened in Europe. There is no bit of late Antiquity western European society, other than the church, that could have taken on that role.
What this, and many posts like it, fail to take into account is that there is a huge gaping chasm between some remote tribe’s belief in gods and the pre- Renaissance and Reformation stranglehold that the all powerful church had on the citizenry. To me, that kind of thinking assumes everyone was sitting around in their Anarcho-Syndicalist communes singing kumbaya. It doesn’t take into account that all men are not created equal and some of those men weaponized religion to extract resources from the masses, and often cruelly so.
As Czarcasm points out, reading, writing, preserving ancient manuscripts, the arts, etc came from the church because they were controlled by the church. Had the church be a helping, magnanimous entity (which it was ostensibly supposed to be) instead of the cruel (witch hunts became prevalent between 1450 and 1750 and thousands of men and women were killed) power-hungry monstrosity it became, you might have a point.
Face it, more harm than good has come out of religion.
Perhaps, but doesn’t ignorance often lead to curiosity? As far as creativity to imagine the unknown, I think in early days religion provided as good an explanation of the unknown as any other they could come up with, and was accepted as incontrovertibly true by most people.
Today, we know more about how things work on our planet and don’t need to invent a supernatural force to explain it. That doesn’t mean science knows everything, or that it can’t be updated with newly accepted findings. Modern science isn’t based on dogma like religion, at least it’s not supposed to be.