Just is.

This may amuse, as I said in message, it is a light hearted take on the subject.

Suppose for a minute, and for the sake of argument only, that there is a god, and an afterlife, including heaven and a hell; and that the god chooses whether people go to heaven, or if some go to hell, in fact the whole theist deal. Not only that, but the criterion on which the god makes the choice is based on the type of muffins they eat. ( Note: “eat” not prefer, this is not about free will or anything like that.) People who eat lemon muffins go to heaven and people who eat chocolate muffins go to hell, with limbo for those who don't eat muffins at all, naturally.

Would that make a difference to your life ? Would you give up your chocolate muffins for an eternity of joy, and all the lemon buns after death you could ever eat ? Perhaps you would. But there is one vital thing that I forgot to mention about this god, which is that; this particular god, does not tell you about his thoughts on muffins, or how they affect your after life, in fact it keeps the whole thing a big secret just to itself, so that you have no way of knowing which muffins you have to eat.

Then in that case, of course, you could not make the appropriate changes to your life, or save your soul anyway. In fact muffins, the gods preferences and even that god, would not impact on your life at all.

The point is this. That a gods, souls, the afterlife etc. have no effect on anything, unless that god, or someone who knows, tells you about it, and you therefore have some knowledge of god's cake prejudices. Making this the big difference between religion, which pretends to offer knowledge of god the afterlife etc., and none belief which does not. Which is why the difference between atheists, humanists, agnostics and even deists, is so small and unimportant by comparison, because none claim any knowledge of gods preferences, and it is the pretense of fake knowledge, and of god given authority, which makes the big difference. Compared with that the differences between atheist and agnostic, even deist, are trivial to the point of vanishing.

I got born, I endured, life was seriously hell physically, then for 3x longer mentally Awful.
Now I am free and happy and enjoying it because I can easily tell the difference. What else counts?

The existence or not of a god or higher meaning, is of no importance. Since if there is a god/meaning which created the universes, then we can only assume that the most likely thing that it wants from us, is that, we live the best lives we can, and maybe do our best to understand, enjoy and appreciate all that the universe is. While, if there is no god/meaning, then all we have worth doing is to, understand, enjoy and appreciate all that the universe is. The same.

Therefore god/meaning makes no difference, unless like the fictional gods of religions, that god/meaning chooses to communicate with us. Which given that there is no clear communication, since all the fictional gods disagree, that seems to be unlikely. They can not all be right, but they could all be wrong.

You may like to try looking up Epicurus.