Unlike your friend, I live every day knowing that at the end, there is nothing left. It may be today, tomorrow or many years from now. There is no seccond chance so I must learn from my mistakes.

I imagine my existance to be similar to an animal that has little or no comprehension of “after life” but lives each day with hopeful expectation of a meal, a good run, some exploring, a fight or a standoff and maybe even some nooky.

Of course humans have a longer conception of time than our animal friends but essentially we are given only so much time so why waste it?

Your friend on the other hand sounds… messed up. Either you looking for damaged (atheist) goods to support your point or you don’t know many atheists. I know quite a few atheists and we generally seem to have a special appreciation for the one life that we are able to live right now.

Now he can try to ignore this feeling and “just live life”, which so many people do, but this doesn’t work for people who absolutely need this larger outlook of what they are here for.

Or he can do what you say we should do, drop negative beliefs and take on only helpful, positive beliefs. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for a lot of people either, usually people of a certain level of education/intellect, the more ‘cerebral’ of society if you will, who cannot rationalize ‘blind belief’ no matter how positive its results on the way they will live. This rationalization filter will not allow such memes to enter our subconscious, they get blocked by a sort of ‘mental firewall’ if you will. One way around this is to insert directly into the subconscious via hypnosis; thats the only way I see what you are proposing to work with people like this. If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, this is exactly what happens. Then you’d get into he’s not really living in reality, only his own ‘fake reality’, the whole life within a matrix if it feels good regardless if its ‘true reality’ etc etc… And then this subject degrades into an infinitely recursive discussion of ontological empiricism and the such.

Some people hold off “living” because they think that they can deal with all that in their afterlife, so sacrifice everything now. They act just like your friend, putting everything off…”oh, never mind, I have the afterlife to get everything done.”

Some people who don’t believe in life after death use this life now to do everything. Live FULL lives. Because they feel they will not have another chance.

And then you get the folks who don’t do good things sincerely – they’re only trying to get brownie points to get to heaven. Or try to minimize their hell points.

It all differs.