I used to kind of hate it.
Actually, I'm not sure that's the right word. I used to be dreadfully confused about it; I grew up in a family that had life, the universe, and everything all figured out down details they couldn't, and can't, possibly know. That's religion for you, I suppose, something I never understood. So one day I determined, through a mix of introspection and education, that something wasn't right, and after doing a lot of legwork and educated guesswork ended up agreeing with the notion that there is almost surely no God. I say almost surely, because I think it's a matter of probabilities when you're dealing with things you just can't know through any other means.
So I'm an atheist, or consider myself an atheist, but I also don't pretend that I know with 100% certainty there is no God; that would be similar to the proposition someone makes when they say with 100% that there is, which we both know is bullshit.
Anyway, talk about a lot of emotional and weird shit you have to grapple with when you're going from belief to non-belief. It's funny, because from day-to-day nothing has actually changed, but it kind of shatters your worldview to some degree, and picking up the pieces is about as fun as having someone stab you. I don't think people generally deal with picking up all those pieces at once; it's a slow, gradual process of deconstructing and reconstructing your old life into a new one, and worse, you have to both understand and respect that reconstruction, even when the new image is decidedly less "pretty" than the old one. Most atheists reconcile this by saying that it simply suffices to know what's "true," or what's most likely to be true based on the evidence. That can help, actually, if you consider yourself a philosopher where truth is the carrot. But really, it does suddenly pull back the curtain and turn order into a bit of chaos; it makes evil somehow more evil. And in ways, it makes good even better.
Yes, you have to decide what life means to you, and maybe you decide that it doesn't mean much, and that's probably okay. So many people base their entire lives around goals which make them happy; some have great jobs, others big families, some make it their business to see the world, and some want to write a book about eating healthy. None of these things directly relate to God, only tangentially, if you let them. At the end of the day, we'll die at some point, and then we can (or can't) really wrestle with the bigger question at play.
I mean, if I wake up on the "other side", my first question will probably be "Okay... who was actually right?" and watch it turn out to be the Mormons or something. Until then, your major goal should be to find a major goal and stop worrying about oblivion. My advice? Find a moral core. Be good for goodness sake. Understand your hobbies. Find work. Find self-worth. If you're still, after all that, feeling empty inside, go find God -- that last one though will surely take you your entire life.
