So why exactly is it so important that I live this life correctly--or at all? Why would I even care to try and determine what "correctly" actually is? I mean, doesn't that require me to figure out if knowing that is even possible?
Life is that which seeks to preserve its state.
If reincarnation is real, and we presume that the odds are in favor of life on other worlds somehow in the vast universe, then shouldn't we expect to be reincarnated on a completely different planet? Do our souls somehow have the limitation of requiring a carbon-based, oxygen breathing vehicle to inhabit?
Once a soul is released, is there something really so unpleasant about being disembodied that we rush to get into new bodies that can be hurt or get sick?
Maybe when we're dead, there's an authority after all. But maybe it's not God, maybe it's a "Council of Human Souls" which, in the same way political groups do on Earth, compel souls to behave in certain ways.
Which is to say, we can never escape the worst of this life. We can never be OK by ourselves.
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Me? I continue to completely disbelieve in anything supernatural, afterlife being prime among the ideas I reject. It's simply too farfetched to imagine some new state of being where the my life's gestalt is retained, even more so if you postulate an uber-organization that provides some sort of meta-commentary and pushing to the almost inexpressibly unlikely notion that there is some mechanism for pushing one into new states of being, especially reincarnation.
So, for me, the question of how to live life properly has to fit completely within the boundaries of life as we see it today. But, to me, that's also really easy.
I start with two postulates. First, I am, fundamentally, a "selfish gene". My primary function, which I share with the lichen, is to cause as many of my genes to continue as possible. The second is that my tool for doing so is a brain that is mainly a pattern recognition tool.
Obviously, the consequences of these two things encompass everything but, without writing a book, the main points are 1) preservation of life (writ large, due to the number of genes I share with most creatures) is a primary motivation, and 2) the pleasure that I take from recognizing patterns (again, writ large because brains perceive them in everything).
Consequently, our ethical systems value the life preserving virtues of social consistency, generosity, sharing, mutual support, etc. Our esthetic systems enjoy peace, security and orderly communities.
And so on.
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