I understand the emotional and mental hardships of losing your religious faith. I had friends to help me along the way but you may not have that luxury. Amade showed my this and it helped me a lot when I lost faith. It's a whole series but if you really feel this strongly about it then you will find the time to watch it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12rP8ybp13s&feature=results_main&playnext=1&list=PLA0C3C1D163BE880AAs for life and death, your purpose here is to make life better for the future generation and for the entire human race and not just some nation, religion, or ideologically identical group. And when you do that and die that duty will be passed to your children and their children. For what purpose? We're going to be killed off by some mass extinction anyway.
But humanity strives to live forever, and it's not getting our species to survive but the journey it takes to get there. We know it's impossible but yet we still strive for it. When you realize that you are human on a planet that you share with so many others, that the oneness you feel with your race is your purpose, that is when you will find meaning. My mother always says, "Strive for perfection even when perfection is impossible. For it is the journey that is more valuable sometimes than the destination."
As for an afterlife, you don't know what will happen. I don't know what will happen and anyone who claims to know is an idiot. They do not possess special mind powers I do not. People who have died and claimed to have seen themselves are most likely experience residual synapse fires in their brain. They know they're dying and their subconscious digs deep into their memories and beliefs to perpetuate a world that they believed in. Why? Probably some sort of survival mechanism but I don't know and that's just my theory.
But yea that's my take on that.
