It’s really the most difficult thing about being an atheist: realizing that there’s no afterlife. When your loved ones die, that’s it. But their memory lives on, as does their teaching — they’re never truly gone unless you completely forget about them. There’s something honest and poetic about that.
Religion ignores that entirely and offers a unsupported myth in its place. As Cerise points out, that’s a comfort that’s hard to drop… but if you want to be honest, you have to let it go.
If you can accept that truth, I think it allows you to live a much better life. You know that your actions and legacy matter and will hopefully be remembered. The truth encourages you to make the most of the one life you have and to connect with the people you love — you’re not going to see them in the afterlife, so cherish that time now.
In other words, I've discovered two more Atheists -- Mehta, and the woman named Cerise Morris whose account of her friend's predictable death from cancer led to Mehta's post -- who might live in the 21st Century according to the calendar, but they still live in the past mentally. Atheists have no excuse in the year 2010 for the mystical, spooky beliefs about death they still cling to, when we have experimental emergency procedures to intervene.
BTW, looking forward to seeing "loved ones" revived from cryonic suspension in Future World does not serve as my primary motivation for cryonics activism. I hope my friends in cryonics survive, along with me, and even some non-friends whom I dislike because they deserve to live as well; but my survival takes priority. I might modify that priority if a suitable cryonicist woman comes along. (Even I feel the occasional tug of "altruism needs," for want of a better term, despite what Objectivist cranks might argue about human nature.) But for a variety of reasons, including personal ones, the prospect of finding such a woman seems extraordinarily unlikely, even if cryonics' demographics change to resemble mainstream society's.
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