While religions offer many things, perhaps the most attractive (and apparently least likely) thing they offer is eternal life.

No one wants to die - yet everyone does.

It appears religions operate extremely lucrative (often tax free) enterprises revolving around the central theme that you can live forever - as long as you give money to [insert religious institution name here] while you are alive. Despite the existence of a very healthy international religious service industry offering access to eternal life through a variety of means, no evidence ever gathered from any observation, measurement or branch of science suggests that an afterlife of any kind might possibly exist.

Is it possible to imagine a better product than religion's promise of eternal life, which costs nothing to offer, is deeply desired by most, purchased at great price by many and whose alleged recipients (whether in ecstasy or torment) appear historically unable to communicate their satisfaction with their investment? Perhaps the only product that even comes close to eternal life is being forgiven for doing something wrong without ever having to make things up to those who were injured by your actions. It seems strange that it is possible that money can buy both eternal life without proof and forgiveness without responsibility in the context of religions whose alleged goal include treating others as you would have them treat you, being honest and doing good works.

The fingerprints of whatever created this place do not appear to include an afterlife, and those surrendering such comforting beliefs find themselves facing an exciting new paradigm. 

Every living human has one chance to make a difference.  While you are alive you have the ability to change many things here on earth, big and small - good and bad, and the "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" concept associated with the science of Chaos shows that even small changes make big differences over time. 

So perhaps every one of us can live forever - although apparently not by giving money to people wearing expensive robes and spending their days roaming huge, virtually empty multimillion dollar environmentally conditioned buildings that so often seem so completely indifferent to homelessness.  Perhaps every time any one of us makes a small but important difference in the world around us, we live on through the ramifications of the difference we made, which forever become a small but significant part of the infinite story of the universe.

Or perhaps we just die, incapable of changing our fate or the universe; our atoms destined to eventually return to the stars that fused them.

In any event, if we spend our time and money in life working to purchase one or more ethereal products that have little or no meaning in the real world, whatever chance this life offers us to change reality is more likely to be squandered, and with it our opportunity to improve the lot of our children and others of future generations. 

Groff Schroeder