Selflessness is Relative

One thing that bothers me about Sri Krishna's advice in the Bhagavad Gita is his advocation and description of 'selfless service' and selflessness in general.  As seems to be the case in many religions or philosophies, this supposed selflessness is not actually selfless; in the case of Krishna's advice to Arjuna, one should practice selfless service because doing so will bring one closer to achieving the ultimate goal of being at peace and possessing "the joy of spiritual awareness" - which is something that one wants for oneself.  One paragraph in particular stood out to me as being especially nonsensical: "Through constant effort over many lifetimes, a person becomes purified of all selfish desires and attains the supreme goal of life" (pg. 145).  The sentiments expressed by this passage appear to be very nearly in exact opposition to one another.  On the one hand, the person referred to by the passage is purified of all selfish desires; on the other, they are attaining something (the supreme goal of life) which they desire.

The Bhagavad Gita is certainly not alone amongst religious and philosophical texts in containing this somewhat hypocritical version of selflessness.  Christianity, with its required obedience to biblical scripture and the will of God, is no better - in fact, it may well be worse, considering that numerous Christians state that those without religion are necessarily immoral.  How, I ask, can someone (let us say an atheist) who does things for the benefit of others alone, because they choose to do so, be less moral than someone who helps others because they believe that they will be granted eternal reward (and exempted from eternal punishment) if they do so?  If anything, I would say the opposite is true; however, I think that the issue is more complicated than that, and while there is no space to go too far into it here I may address it in another post.  For now, I shall merely refrain from stating that religious people cannot be moral (I believe they can be), and instead list a few other religions/philosophies which suffer a similar lack of consistency regarding selflessness - namely Islam, Judaism, Confucianism, and secular belief in 'the golden rule'.