Enough of this crap, I want to hear directly from god

[The Grand Nudger]

And what are these facts ? You provided none. Children are just tilted towards belief, regardless of their culture or their parents' influence.
Of course you can loosen the definition of purpose to take out anything about the divine or heaven. But that would be just you playing with nomenclature.

You supplied all the facts I require.

Children tend to ascribe purpose to natural phenomena, and children have trouble with difficult concepts.  Given these two things about children I find it wholly unremarkable that they explain whatever purpose they see....real or imagined, in fanciful and familiar terms.  

Yes.. Of course I can't prove a negative assertion. What's remarkable, though, is that you're prepared to consider the possibility of an afterlife with no god, but not prepared to consider that the universe is the product of a conscious architect. We have more good reasons for the latter than for the former. I think that's a bit dishonest.

I'm prepared to consider all sorts of possibilities, including the possibility that something I know with certainty is wrong.  That said, we are only concerned with one possibility at present.  The possibility that the things children see aren't indicative of the existence of gods.

Absent any deity, nothing differentiates me technically from a battery. Does a dead battery have an afterlife ? We can't prove that it doesn't, at the same time we know it just won't happen.

To me, that's an absurd assertion.  You are just as different from a battery without a god as you are with a god.   No fact about you or batteries change on account of changing some fact about a god.  Just like no fact about chickens or eggs changes by changing a fact about the chicken god.

Consider this. You and I are different people. A third person is in the room with us. Do you and I cease to be different people when that third person leaves the room? Do we become different people, again, when that person reenters?

I agree. And in this case, what purpose can you make of the universe, while thinking about all the billions of victims of war, genocide, famine, torture, rape, how they're gone forever, how their only precious lives are taken away forever by some lunatic's thirst for power or lust..?

All of the purpose I already make, and all of the purpose that children see.  For you, this is some black hole of meaning that you can't escape from - but for me...it's just a thursday.

You rattled off a list of Bad Things™...and it seems to me that since you're so concerned with them, you could find purpose in preventing them or helping victims of those things. You could do this, and people do exactly this, regardless of whether they believe in gods, and regardless of whether there are any gods. I didn't have any trouble doing it, or finding purpose in it.

-and..before you launch yourself wholeheartedly into some comment about how only god-purpose is real purpose, and all of those people who don't need god for purpose have it wrong - consider what that does to your assertion about children and their tendencies. You would be asserting that some (if not most) of what they see...is wrong, not real.