1) If religion isnt made up stories to make people feel better, how come every religion has afterlife and usually some kind of "if you do good good will happen to you" ethic?

2) If you are trying to find out some meaning to the universe, how does saying god did it solve anything? It boils down to who made god, "he was always there" which is just as valid as saying, "the universe was always here", apart from the fact that there is a shitload of evidence pointing towards a big bang style scenario and no evidence pointing to a beardy super man making the universe in 7 days, and inventing light before the sources of light.

1) Its human nature to be sadistic. We all worship death. We have made death into our God through religion. We call this God an Afterlife because we are too ignorant to understand entities without a noun/pronoun. We let the thought of what our Afterlife is going to be like, dictate how we live our current lives. Therefore, death has become our God and religion is a more simpler way of making it not sound so sadisitc.

2) Every religious icon was right to talk in parables/metaphors to us. They understood human nature itself. As humans, not only are we sadistic, but we are also ignorant. We actually like to stay ignorant. When things get to complicated we feel overwhelmed. Some of us even openly give in and just say "God said so." They needed to talk to us as if we are children.

One thing they failed to get through to us, because of our limited understanding of abstract concepts is that there is no beginning or end to anything. Space is infinite, there is no end to outerspace. Time is also infinite, time will go on forever. But what we don't realize is that infinity doesn't just go in one direction. When you realize that, you realize there is no end as there is no beginning.

Physically, our molecules get recycled through life forever. We know this because of a physical law of conservation of energy. we die, we get buried, rot, roasted, whatever, our remains return to the earth which feeds alternate lives on earth.

The mental aspect is what we can't comprehend because we need that aspect to comprehend anything in the first place. Dying with a simple cease of mental existence is hard to comprehend for us. Some say the mental aspect is eternal also because it is carried through offspring by the way we raise them. Some say we carry it into the afterlife, and others say we just reincarnate with a vagueness of it.

I say, in our limited perception, it is eternal. Because of the fact that in this reality we are just dreams of another. We are all actually sleeping cognatives of ourselves in an actual reality where we do not have limitations as we do now. We don't become overwhelmed, we don't have use for petty things like materials, emotions, needs, wants... An actual reality where we follow the laws of infinity like space and time.