Note: I'm not referring explicitly to Jesus or Christianity anywhere. My argument applies to all forms of spiritual, faith-based, belief, Western or otherwise.

Throughout human history, every religion has attempted to provide comfort to its followers by ascribing some kind of meaning to life. And all this time, the true answer to "What is the meaning of life?" has been something of a holy grail to many, many people.

The problem is that, not only is the question un-answerable, it's actually meaningless.

Trying to ascertain a meaning to life is like trying to ascertain whether Tuesday is blue. The two concepts simply don't have enough in common to allow any kind of basis for comparison. The most that anyone can say with any degree of certainty is that "life [for you personally] is what you [personally] make of it."

Of course, that belief isn't incompatible with religious doctrine: it just renders all that dogma unimportant. Nor does the rejection of religion based on this belief have anything to do with nihilism, because it does not in any way support the idea that no human action is preferable to any other. After all, there is plenty of objective evidence to indicate that groups of people are better off when they cooperate than when it's every man for himself.

The bottom line is that, if we hold to the goal of improving ourselves and our lives, we simply don't need the comfort of a supreme being, a concept of an afterlife, or any other mythos. Life is nothing more than what we ourselves make of it. No god can help us or stand in our way.