What happens after death doesn’t much matter to me. I know. Weird, right? Here’s my logic. We go through our whole lives. We can cause great pain, or we can do great things. And at the end of it, our bodies decay and our soul goes somewhere. Maybe nowhere. It could vanish into thin air for all I know, or return to the earth from whence it came.

I don’t believe in hell because I don’t believe there’s such a thing as retribution for those who hurt others, as nice of an idea as that may be. I don’t believe in heaven because I don’t think there’s a direct correlation between doing good here and having a nice fluffy cloud to retire to in the sky. Yes, it would be lovely if people like Jeffrey Dahmer were punished for all of eternity. But the idea of justice is very subjective, and I don’t think there’s such a thing as one way to be good, or one way to be evil. You can be terrible by saying awful things to someone until their self-esteem is broken and they kill themselves. You didn’t directly kill them, but you may as well have. You can go to church and do charities and only do them because you want to feel good about yourself, which isn’t really a Christian ideal. And then there’s the idea of repentance. If you just say you’re sorry for what you’ve done and feel it in your heart, you can still go to heaven. But that doesn’t take away the wrong you’ve done. If you’ve killed someone, it doesn’t bring them back.

In many instances, there’s no right or wrong, there are a lot of gray areas, a lot of room for error, and it seems strange to think that one could go to hell because they love someone of the same sex, or because they had sex before marriage. There can’t be one punishment for everyone. “Dante’s Inferno,” which paints a really grisly image of hell, can be seen as ironic, but people take that image of hell very seriously. And there, there are various circles of hell to punish people or give them a chance of retribution so that they can go to heaven. But it’s all a fairy tale. No one has ever gone and seen it in person and come back to tell the tale. None of it is based in concrete fact.

I’m the kind of person who believes in what they see. I see stripes in the Grand Canyon and know that it means a great river once flowed through there. I see the results of thousands of years of artificial selection when I look at an orange. I see pain in the eyes of those I hurt when I say or do something harmful, whether or not it was intentional. I see cause and effect in this world. Whether it carries on to the next is irrelevant to me.

I don't believe in doing something for a god who created this world so full of pain. I just try to do good. Not because I think I will be rewarded for it in the next life, or punished for it if I don’t -- I do it because I think it’s right. I do it because I don’t want to cause pain for others. Really, I think if you’re kind to others, that’s all that matters. I get that people are worried about their souls, that they want there to be something after this world full of pain, misery, and loss. But I think that life should be enjoyed for the sake of life. And that you should only do good because you want to.