I've always found the concepts of afterlife and reincarnation very intriguing, even though I ultimately dismiss both ideas out of hand. Just think of the hundreds-of-trillions-to-one chance of your existing at all. Your father produced hundreds of millions of sperms every day - every day - and your mother had tens of thousands of eggs at the ready. If that wasn't enough, multiply that by their parents, then by their parents....go right back to the dawn of life. Yet you're here. You made it. The chance of you being you was vanishingly infinitesimal. Yet here you are. You're a winner. And if you're reading this on an expensive computer in a wealthy western country, and you have reasonable health and a good life with family or friends, there's plenty of icing on your cake, even though not everything will be perfect.

So what do we do? Why, that isn't enough. We want more! We want another life after this one! We can't believe that we've already had more than our share of good fortune. Not only that, we want the next life to be infinitely better! Floating up there with angels in God's divine presence!

Well I have a better way of thinking about it. I thank my lucky stars that I'm here at all, I'm happy to be here and I want to make the best of it. Lusting after even more stops me from doing that. Instead of enjoying life and searching for what's really true, I find I have to conform to lots of rules invented in order to control me by weird men in Rome or elsewhere (it always seems to be men) and I have to worry that, unless I do the right things, I won't get the afterlife I want. Living like that is not making the best of it. It's a pretty dismal prospect, in fact.

"There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Now where did I read that...