What We Do in This Life Matters
I don’t know why the God question is so enmeshed with all of these other social issues, but it is. It shouldn’t be. It’s OK to be a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. I don’t think there is a God, or any sort of anthropomorphic being who needs to be worshipped, who listens to prayers, who keeps a moral scoreboard that will be settled in the end, or who cares one iota about who wins the Super Bowl. There is no afterlife. We just die, and that’s it. Which is why what we do in this life matters so much—and why how we treat others in the here and now is more important than how they might be treated in some hereafter that may or may not exist. --Michael Shermer, "Why I Am an Atheist"