I've had these and similar questions posed to me before, like :if you're an athiest, how can you have morals, and where are they based if you do?

For some unfathomable reason "people of faith" percieve that morals can only arise in others based on their faith, and hence, if one espouses no faith, they can not then have a moral base, which is total BS. In truth, each religon will bend or manipulate morality based upon their beliefs, with each religon then having it's own idividual concept of what is then moral. This then will often put each varying religon at odds with the morality espoused by another faith, and there my friend is where the root of all religous persecution/discrimination of differing faiths and subsequent misery begins in how members of differing faiths treat others.

It's really simple JG, we (many or most of us) live and act morally because it's benificial to ourselves and those around us in making life easier and more pleasant. Laws only exist as a protection against those in the world who choose not to respect the concepts of common sense and good manners in how to treat or interact with others.

There's an interesting movie called KPAX that has an interaction between the 2 main characters, an alien from KPAX and a psychiatrist where the alien is relating that on his planet there are no laws to which the psychiatrist then asks "If there are no laws, how do you determine right from wrong?". The response he gives is so simplistic, yet oh so real and direct, which is "Every living being knows right from wrong".

Most people will by nature reflect the morality (or lack of it) exhibited by their parents, or at least use these concepts as a basis to either agree or disagree with them once the individual reaches the point of formulating cognizant thoughts of their own. This concept is the basis for the idea we are all, at least initially, products of our environment, though we as thinking animals are also capable of making changes to ourselves, or to put it into another context, are free then to evolve socially and individually, regardless of what we were initially taught or shown earlier on.

I have a hard time grasping how a basis on a belief that we are to continue on in some other plane of existence once our physical bodys here cease to be supportable has any bearing upon how life ocurrs or how we interact with others while we're here. The feelings you stated about wanting to feel as if we have some greater purpose or meaning to our lives and that if that were not true, then why would we choose to act morally if not, to me misses the point of life totally.

Since most of us want to be happy, wouldn't it make sense that as a apart of that, we find happiness through doing things that make us happy? We love and care for others because it validates us individually as humans to do so, which brings us to the basis of most things which is that it's all really for self anyway, but that's another really long topic, so ....

I understand the psychological dynamic relevant to one wanting to feel as if we will carry on after our own death, but my thoughts are this is only a function of individual vanity, since conceding the idea that we only have what we have while we're alive is a seemingly cruel cosmic joke that's perpetrated upon us all, but my thoughts are that indeed, that's all there is.

I try in my godless way to live a life that makes me happy and in turn makes others around me happy because that feels good to me and because I believe that's the way we were meant to live, for ourselves and the betterment of our fellow humans. I know that even in my death, some of me will live on here in my children and their childrens children and so on and that the time I have shared with others here will also have impact on their lives in some way. Many things I have built, written, and even the thoughts I've shared with others will in some small way live on after I cease to exist here and that's plenty for me