Earlier quoted context omitted.
I define myself as an atheist, though by your definition I may be closer to an agnostic. My position is closer to “whether God exists or not, it does not matter much to me.” I sometimes think free will exists, and I sometimes imagine that perhaps someone created all of this, though I do accept evolution. In that sense, I think my view is close to yours. Personally, I also think religion has real benefits. Many local…
As an over-educated person who still struggles to think for himself through everything from scratch, the above nevertheless sounds like Descartes' dubito, ergo sum From this, I can go in practical (ie, separable from free will & other ontological considerations) directions, like: insofar as organised religion does not equate existence with faith, maybe its most important use is to overcome the fear of death. That's c…
In my case, I simply think of death as a state. Everything is a process moving toward death, and whether it is fear or happiness, I feel that these are temporary states. Even the point at which we think “we ought to be happy” seems to me to be a matter of belief. It is shaped by media and other forces, and most of the forms we imagine are, in a sense, built on imitation. But even so, I do not think that a single moment of intense emotion is a bad thing.
However, I think the very premise that something must be overcome is itself constructed. For example, I work in a profession that sells mental models. After thinking about what the profession of programming really is, this is the answer I have: OOP, FP, DOP, and procedural programming are all ways of constraining things within a particular abstract frame, and then executing automation within that bounded space.
Just as astrophysics is not the study of telescopes, and computer science is not merely the study of computers, our profession is about placing mental models for understanding the world within the constraints of the tool called the computer. Just as, to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, to me everything looks like the act of placing a complex world into limited cognition. Programming, too, appears to me to be that kind of work.
From that perspective, the meaning of human life and the fear of death also seem to be processes of placing a cognitive model inside a particular frame. I may be one of the cheapest developers on Upwork, but that defines my current state, not my entire identity.
So, to me, the fear of death and my price on Upwork are the same kind of thing. Both are states, not identities. And both have meaning only inside a particular mental model. Outside the model, they are just piles of facts: I am alive; I assign meaning to the fact that I love this profession I have; I will soon die; I am traded in the market; and in the meantime, I create abstractions.
I am not claiming that my way is better than the way religion deals with this. But it is at least one piece of evidence that a person can live without religion. A person who works with abstraction as a profession can also apply abstraction to himself. That is the method I have found.