Thanks, but again, “living as if you were going to benefit somehow from something that isn’t going to happen is pointless” is exactly where you are missing the point. My observations whilst nursing untold numbers of dying people is that, regardless whether there is a life after death, dying in a bed is where I can benefit from the way I have lived. Unless you have done this any amount of times you may miss this point. Even my wife can only see that it is sad and terrible and all the other things people feel about the death process, but she did agree, that her mother is dying in the way she lived, just as I had said in the many other times when she wasn’t emotionally involved.
Just as an aside, have you seen the cartoon of the ecologist meeting, talking about climate change where the caption say’s, “What if this is all a hoax and we improve the quality of the air, of the water and the land for nothing!” The cartoon makes us laugh, because improving the environment is a goal unto itself, just as the life with the qualities I mentioned is.
Despite what I think about the conservative beliefs, I have seen people from these churches die in a remarkable peace, and I believe that this is the measure of piety, not how literally they take the Bible or how well they can quote it. If they fall into oblivion, it isn’t as though they will know anything … at they same time, if they have lived good lives, they have profited and helped others profit from them having lived.