I'm fine with no gods, religion, or afterlife.
I determine my own purpose on a daily basis.

I was once involved with a man who told me that he believes in his god and an afterlife, because he just can't accept that this life is the only one we get.
He said he can't handle there not being some sort of reward for all the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" he's had to deal with in his life.

It was at that moment I realized he was too weak of character for me to waste anymore of my time with him.
I can't deal with that sort of victim mentality.
Expecting a reward because you think your life has been so hard? Grow the fuck up.
There are more people on this rock who have had it WAY tougher than you (general you/him).
I can't stomach whiners.
Anymore than I can stomach believers.

I have seen more death that I care for .
Never a pleasant deal . Almost never . I can’t say that I shed any tears for any unsuccessful code blue on pedophiles under my care . In fact , I have opened bag of cheetos and had a nice big cup of ice water while body still warm and my team had to clean up .
I came to the conclusion that how we live is important . How we die , pure accident . Even if a worthy life , even if loved and appreciated , we often die alone .
Even if plenty of humans around us , the last battle and struggle , the last push to let go , we go through alone .
That makes me very sad . From trauma and unexpected , to expected end of life , death it still makes me cry for my patients . To watch someone die , to be unable to bring them back , to be unable to comfort them besides drugs , is devastating to me .
Every human , it’s a story . And a chart or relatives , they provide their version of the human’s life . Not always true . And that’s sad too .
In addition to jump w drugs and hands on someone’s chest , I often have to hear the Christian relatives doing their shit and saying their shit . Waiting for lord to take him / her , or expecting lord to save him . Either way , certain that heaven is waiting . I don’t fight them . What the fuck for . Doesn’t matter . And the liar I am , I have offered my hand and prayed w them . Bcz loss is loss , love is love , and that’s all they know . I don’t give a fuck . I ll act . Their pain is real . Their god is not , but pain is real , and if I can ease the pain , I will .
My own death , well , gods where never in the menu . No conflict or worries there . Afterlife was never a thought . Raised atheist and raised to understand that when it’s over is over .
As I am getting older , I want to chose the day that I die . Jesus and such will go broke if depend on my $$$ to survive my death . I want to exit when ready , and I want my dogs to be gone first so to provide them w comfort at their end . I have no other worries about death .

So basically people chose religion because they “can’t handle the truth?” They are cowards.

Friend, Religions such as Christianity focus solely upon, when it comes to the Preaching to the Congregation that is, DEATH and the false promise of a Life AFTER Death, they do NOT focus upon Life, the Here and the Now because that would totally defeat their true purpose which is to continue to "dangle the carrot on the stick" in front of the nose and keep you reined in, harnessed and pulling the Preachers and Church Hierarchy along in the ease and comfort to which they have created for themselves and grown exceedingly used to and totally dependent upon.

Education and experience shape our beliefs and how we see people and the world.

We can change our beliefs when we have a new experience or learning.

Not wanting to die, at the moment of death is a pretty universal trait among all animals. Humans, and possibly a few other species, have the ability to look ahead and recognize it is inevitable. Choosing to live for some imaginary being, for "comfort," is a sad way to live. Hey, maybe there is more to life, after death. I doubt it; I see no evidence; science seems to indicate a destruction of the entire universe at some time. I liked Koko the gorilla's response to what is death - darkness, just darkness. I would rather live life the best I can with the limited means I have, and not be beholden to some imaginary figure or said figure's totally assholed followers.

I live at the bottom of the human food chain because I don't believe in acquiring status through the materialistic pursuit of luxury. I think it brings out the worst in human nature, like greed.
To me, if you live a honorable life, religion is irrelevant; you're covered whether there's an afterlife or not; I choose to HOPE there is, but either way, I can like what I see in the mirror.

Easy answers, first was the churches involvement into politics. Second is the sick practice of the Catholic Church protecting sickos who have and will harm the souls of innocent children.

Your friend cannot accept the reality of his own mortality which is why he accepts the claims of the God Squad and why he rejects facts, evidence and common sense.

I try to NEVER use the word "believe," if I can help it. Except, on Saturday evening, I'm likely to say something like, "I believe I'll have a cold beer." Belief is a dirty word in my vocabulary. I don't even believe in gravity. But, after a lifetime of observations, I ACCEPT that gravity does indeed work.

He cannot except that we all become "worm dirt?" Actually, it is not true when you consider how we are buried today. The claim is that we are in coffins inside a concrete enclosure to protect the earth. The reality is that we want to protect the dead body for religious reasons and do so at all costs.

But why not "worm dirt?" What is so special about YOU. What do you have that nobody else does? Well, you have a "soul" and some other doodly doo. Prove it. Animals all eat each other to survive mostly and we have to be better than the animals. We are, because they have no soul or doodly doo. But wait, there are spirit animals in the bible. How do you explain that? OK. I just cannot believe that my thoughts and ability to think are going to just go away. I do have to admit I cannot remember when this started. Oh, crap! "Is this the end of Rico?" I threw that last part in from an E. G. Robinson movie. Oh, wait. That was Emanuel Goldenberg. Everything and everybody has a disguise mostly to get what and where you want.

I don't worry about it. When asked, I'm pretty honest about it. At the end of the day, nobody really owns the truth about these matters anyway.

I only know how to be me. I have never been good at faking who I am, so what I believe or don't believe has never really been a consideration as to how I look at life or live my life. To quote Popeye the sailor man, "I am what I am". I accept the things I like about myself and I accept the things I don't like about myself that I can't seem to change. I have my own sense of right and wrong and do my best to live up to that although I haven't always succeeded in doing so. As for death, a friend of mine once said when you die it will all go black or it will be light and you will be somewhere else. That works for me.

Intellectually, emotionally, n morally, we are what we think and subscribe to. As Jean Piaget pointed out, we all encounter experience and digest those experiences to form cognitive structures or patterns of meaning. We also develop cognitive schema which help us to process and integrate new experiences and information. We attach emotions and value to he beliefs and structures. he more central the knowledge or beliefs is in our cognitive structures, he greater the emotional attachment. We are what we think and believe.

The problem with using an external ideology to define who and what we are, is that it becomes the ore and warps every other thought or belief. If "true belief" in that ideology is the core, you have difficulty imagining anything different.

Realising that I am and WE all are just mortal beings and that when we die we ARE dead and there is nothing to come after that except to decay and disappear back in to nature and the elements that made us up in the first place has made me see that LIFE is for LIving, Enjoying, making the most of and that we started out as star-dust and to star-dust we all eventually will return.

Makes me freer to express myself without guilt and anxiety. That's about all, though.

We are all our own perspective on reality, use it our lose it. The glass is half empty or is it half full? It all depends up on the perspective of the person.

Deaths around me.... 'Simple as that.

Maybe your friend will wakeup to reality after talking with you.

Seen too much death never nice or pleasant

I have often repeated the same logic. My skepticism about the existence of a God, only makes me more motivated to enjoy every single moment that I have in a positive way! As far as us being worm food. Why would anyone waste their time concerned or worried about something that they can't change?

That is a very hard question. As per Daniel Kahnemann and co, our actions and choices are influenced more by the "fast thinking" which is intuitive and not necessarily rational. The part of our consciousness that we consider to be the self plays a smaller role in our actions and decisions. Talk about impostor syndrome! I think your friend speaks for a lot of people, entire civilizations even, when he considers his faith to be a shield against the fear of death (refer The Denial of death by Ernest Becker). I think those of us who don't have religious beliefs, substitute it with some other beliefs, such as humanism, or some other cause to ascribe meaning to our lives. Belief is central to survival in my opinion.

Quite simple…….I am what I am, if ya can deal with it, then fine. If not, oh well. That’s your problem a lot more than it is mine.

Thinking and believing have involvement with some form of knowledge. Weither the knowledge held is correct or not is something I have learned about as causation for me to leave christianity changing my outlook in ways.

As you mentioned your friend expecting afterlife, I as a Christian i wasn't interested in afterlife. I believed there were the things of biblical prophesy that can be observed and had expectations of "something " about the return of to do things like Crush the Masonic lodge secret religion racist devil worshipper European invador governmental terrorist bringing them to true justice and an end to bring to freedom for everyone on Earth.

Yet as I had believed in doing my part of "fighting the good fight of faith ", my criminal investigation of organized criminal activity of governmental officials of the Masonic lodge secret religion racist devil worshipper European invador governmental terrorist in legal and spiritual warfare obviously didn't do anything. As I left christianity over 10 years ago amistad the "failure of what I believed in" didn't work out, I had to do a lot of deep research and thinking to understand what was really going on.

My outlook is still no interest in anything of an afterlife sort, I didn't ask for this existence. I am just existing waiting my turn to just die and be in non-existance with the non-existent flying spaghetti monster sky God. In the meantime, I do try to educate people on what I have learned in my experience. Supposingly in a few billion years the Sun will explode or expand to burn up everything on Earth, so, most all life would likely become extinct on Earth.