>>186
I grew up in a religious cult; once I worked free of that I found myself 120% done with the idea of the supernatural in its entirety. Nothing/nobody's listening except yourself, you won't come back as something else, there is no fate after death except infinite nothing you'll never perceive, and I'm at the point where I'm pretty comfortable with that. I would argue that you should do some good deeds and charity work, but not out of a sense of fear or guilt. Just do what you can to make things a bit nicer in the world today and the world will be a bit nicer for it...why wait for an eternal reward?

I mean, I won't deny that prayer has value, the same sort of value that meditation has. Neither will cause things to violate causality, conservation, or any other property of the universe. But they can expose and explore things that are important to you, they can help you find peace and relief, they can help you ask questions and figure things out.

I remember pleading with the universe for a cute girl to squeeze, and then finding a very willing one before long. Did the universe deliberately provide me a cute girl to squeeze? No, the universe didn't deliberately do anything, I just happened to have pretty good timing that time. Basically none of my other prayers, some of which were extremely sincere and passionate, were answered, ever. More generally, if the great whatever wants to hook me up with a cute girl on request but not materially protect other less-fortunate kids from crippling poverty, corruption, disease, rape, and untimely death...I'll take my chances on the callous, indifferent universe instead. If I'm wrong after all and I come back as some awful deep sea creature, so what? Most likely I wouldn't comprehend enough to suffer from such an existence any more than the average human does anyway.