(November 18, 2021 at 1:12 pm)T.J. Wrote: Where do you really go from here? I've come to the conclusion that there are no gods, no heaven, no hell, no afterlife, and that when I die I'll either rot in the ground or be cremated and just cease to exist. That the universe just came into being with no specific purpose, so now what? Or does there even need to be a 'now what?'
That's pretty much it, there doesn't need to be a "now what".
You don't need to join a club, you don't need to start studying science if that's not your thing, you don't need to read the works of prominent atheists (or theists) unless you're interested in how they think and how they arrived at their conclusions.
I'd also avoid the implication that atheists have a better grasp of science than theists do. Sure, science can debunk a few specific claims that some religions make (like the Genesis account, we know that's not how planetary formation works, or how to tell if a woman cheated on you, that's not how human biology works) and render other claims dubious at best (like the concept of an eternal Hell which seems silly and made up for a being supposedly capable of creating sophisticated star systems that are in a constant state of gradual change), but it doesn't definitively prove or disprove gods, afterlives or "the divine" in general.