As libertarians, we look upon incentives with a worshipping eye. Perhaps even more than Pavlov might have. And with the same benevolent eye, we view the mechanism that facilitates the giving and receiving of incentives between the teeming individuals of society – the market. Indeed, the Market is the closest to any God for a spiritually-starved libertarian atheist.
Spiritualists, Puritans et al, however, decry this. Crass materialism they call it. They shake their heads at the degradation of a society that considers Markets and Money as the primary driving influences. And with a sigh, they go back to their rosaries.
Actually, I agree with them.

Individuals in a society have needs and desires. These desires and needs can be satisfied by other members of the society. But why should others work for your needs? Up sprang trade, and to better facilitate it, a unit for exchange, viz., money. Thus a unit of money represents a unit of labor (manual, intellectual, etc). The more money you have, the more society owes you in terms of labor, and thus more of your desires and needs can be satisfied.

But a societal model solely based on incentivising getting more money, which is basically units of labor, runs into trouble. For unfortunately, some desires and needs cannot be quantified in terms of mere units of labor by others in society. By this I mean that they cannot be satisfied by the labor of others in society.

The most obvious in this renegade set of desires is: Feelings of society vis-a-vis the individual; such as fame, respect, love etc.
But this post is about a far more important need, maybe the singlemost important “need” of humans. And this is where the religious brigade comes in.
Motivation. Mankind needs to be motivated by a “goal”, a longish-term goal. Indeed, look at the greatest artistic works of man: they’ve all been “driven” by some great motivation, most often religious-motivation.
For long, religion and spiritualism, and often hand-in-hand patriotism and nationalism, basically a belief in something larger than oneself, has been a large motivation and inspiration for mankind.

First off, this might seem dissonant. The purport of motivation as a need is that man has a “need” for an obstacle that he has to remove.
But I reckon it is by far a larger driver of progress and happiness than any other thing. And this hasn’t escaped societal planners till now either. Giving the masses something to strive for, has been a time-tested monarchical formula.

There are too many issues here, so let me again characterize the main issue at this point: Mankind has needs that he has to satisfy. The goal of a society is to maximize the satisfaction of these needs. As argued above, “crass materialism” – an over-importance to monetary incentives – results in many needs being unsatisfied.

But that is hardly a debatable point. What is, however, is what systems need to be in place? Free markets result in mankind easily satisfying monetarizable needs. What about the others?
Religion, since ages, has satisfied mankind’s need for a larger-than-self inspiration/motivation. But it has increasingly trapped itself into a corner. Patriotism/Nationalism has historically been another such motivation. Interestingly, most libertarians tend to have a lot of scorn for theism AND nationalism.
I agree both have their failings. But what I do not agree with is the market-fundamentalist idea that free markets and “crass materialism” could fill in their shoes completely.