I'd like to add something to what I said earlier, and I'll put it in a large print so people will notice it.
For me, everything that religion aims to provide I already have.
Yes, this includes what happens after death. Through many experiences in my life in the past 15 years, and through conversations with some of the most intelligent people I've known, I've learned that religion's benefits are null and void with what I have obtained. Think about it.
First, I'll knock out the big one: "What happens when we die?" I was talking to my therapist, name
Dudley Sigler-Black, Ph.D., about my uncle who recently killed himself, and he enlightened me to something that lifted any worry or fear I had regarding my uncle. He told me numerous accounts of experiences that both his patients (incognito) and documentations of other doctors' experiences of crossing the void of death. With references to names of doctors and organizations to search myself (which I did), he first told me of this man who had died on the operating table. When he died, he left his body and ever so gradually an unimaginably bright light consumed his vision. Oddly, he was drawn to it. Does this sound familiar? He moved closer and closer to it, until a voice told him to stop. The voice told him he had a choice, he could either go on ahead, or go back and live his life some more. At that point he decided to go back, thinking of his family and how they would fare without him. And he told this experience.
Another experience conducted on about 2,000 small children between 5 and 9 by Harvard Medical, involves this. There was an 8-year-old boy named Jack, and his parents decided to take him to a psychiatrist when they noticed he kept drawing pictures of plane crashes. So, Jack went to the psychiatrist, and explained to the man that he had died in a plane crash, his name was Jack (before he died), that he was sad that he died, and wanted to cope with it through drawing pictures. This sounds crazy, no? Jack's father was in staunch belief that his kid is playing a game, and was trying to screw with them. They took him to almost two dozen different doctors, where one hooks him up to a lie detector test, which yields negative results. Eventually the kid says that he had crashed into a very specific naval model battleship, and gives him the name of the boat. His dad searches it, but doesn't find anything—in battleships, that is. It turns out that there was a ship with that name, but it wasn't a battleship – it was an aircraft carrier. Through that, the people keeping tabs on this manage to find the wife of this so-called Jack who died in a plane crash on the USS so-and-so, and they bring Jack to her. He introduces himself as her husband, and she blushes, saying that her husband died. He claims that he is in fact him, and describes to her a picture that he drew of her before he died. In the attic of her house, she finds that very same picture—exactly as the 8-year-old described it.
A third (and somewhat shorter) story Dr. Black told me, was this. A man had died on the operating table, and had (like before) left his body. As he floated there, he heard the dialogue between the head surgeon and the nurse, regarding some sort of message to get some medicine. After the surgeon brought him back to life, he talked with him, telling him exactly what the doctor and the nurse had said—while he was dead.
Before you flap around saying "sources lol smh", I have it. It's called my therapist, whose name is linked to his profile on his employer's website. He's been doing his job for over 25 years.
As for the other, less important things that religion aims to fill, moral values are covered for me in recorded history. Everything else? Riff raff.