I think that your outlook on life is shaped by a lot of things, and religion might only have a minor effect on a lot of people. Some of the most glum and depressing people I've ever met happened to be devout Christians-- their belief that the next life was the one worth living made them treat their current life as something to endure instead of enjoy. I enjoy life as much now as I did when I was a believer, because I'm just that kind of person. I suppose that if I tried hard enough, I could become depressed about the future and my inevitable death, but there are simply too many cool and interesting and fun things to do in the meantime. So I'll just be busy doing those, while other people decide to waste what time they have by being depressed about what will happen when it runs out.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
