Can I steal that for a sig?
No, because life isn’t fair. 
If life was fair they could stop me. MWHAHAAA!
In fact, this is one problem with believing an afterlife. There’s less incentive to make the world as fair as possible now.
If you’re serious about this, get therapy. Soon. I think the reason people came up with the idea of hell was for just this reason, but this sounds unhealthy to me.
What do I think? I think “what the hell is fair?” Because I think somebody did something wrong, the universe should punish them? We’d all be in deep crap if that was how things worked. Whose conception of fair should we work according to? Mine? Yours? Whose is superior?
You learn to let go of things, which is an ability all people need. Some people will get theirs in some sense or other. Some won’t, and there’s nothing I can do about it. You get mad, talk it out or do something, if you can, deal with it, and move on. I’d say there’s one person on earth who I’d really want to get that kind of revenge on, and I’ll probably never even see his face. I try not to carry that weight around with me.
See above. What’s the point in being that vindictive?
This is quite a legitimate point.
“Global warming? Ozone hole? Who gives a shit what the world will be like in a hundred years? I’m gonna be in heaven, and besides, Jesus’ll be along any day now.”
I’m not saying all or even most Christians (or other religious people) are like this. However, it’s uncanny how many of them seem to manage to get themselves into positions of power.
I think Steve Martin’s character in Roxanne said it best:
Case in point: Secretary Of Interior under Reagan, James Watt. He said something to the effect that since Jesus is coming there’s no reason to protect the environment. The Secretary Of Interior said this!!
Google “James Watt” jesus for cites.
Life sucks, and then you die. Missing loved ones, and the inevitability of your own eventual non-existence, are just the terrible things we shove away so we can get on with our own business.
Though the existentialists encouraged us to confront death, the fact is that most of us do so only rarely. Confronting death is a paralyzing experience. We simply wouldn’t be very good at survival if we thought about our own death alot, so we create defense mechanisms. For some, there’s the notion of an afterlife, and the accompanying coping mechanisms for the death of relatives.
Myself, I haven’t had a close relative die yet, and am somewhat afraid that when this occurs I might fall into the trap of lying to myself and winding up religious through intellectual dishonesty.
At any rate, I have serious doubts that personal identity can survive a nonmaterial existence (the existential equivalent of “the medium is the massage” 
), so a spiritual afterlife isn’t that appealing to me, so long as I remain grounded in reason.
Marley23:
I think you missed the whoooooshing sound.
I agree. Evolution and God are not necessarily mutually exclusive ideas. Though neither is necessarily evidence of the other, the one (evolution) could simply describe the method of the other (God). That said, in my atheist mind there is abundant evidence of evolution, but insufficent evidence of God.
As to an afterlife, I think evidence is lacking. But what I consider evidence certainly isn’t universal. Many people are satisfied with “evidence” that would not satisfy me. As far as the OP is concerned, I don’t think that the desire, or the longing, if you will, to see departed loved ones again is quite the same thing as a need. I desire to to see my mother again, and to win the lottery, but I certainly don’t need either. And the liklihood of either occurrence is virtually equal.
This thread, to me, brings up a fundamental problem of life.
When people we love die, we miss them terribly. We wish there were some way to see them again. The real lesson to be learned from the experience is that life is precious, and those who possess it must be cherished while they have it. This is the morality that many of the religious claim is missing from the non-religious.
The alternative is to naively hope that we may have one more chance to finish our business with our dear departed. We invent, without a shred of evidence, an afterlife where we may once again see those we miss.
Of course, if those we love live on, those we hate may live on as well, and we do not wish to see them ever again. So we invent some system whereby we and those we love go to a pleasant afterlife, and those we hate do not.
Then, we set up some all-seeing force who loves us personally, and will send everyone to the proper place. Of course, not wanting to appear selfish, we create some arcane code of behavior which we must follow, or risk being sent among our enemies.
Naturally, we do not wish to appear crazy, thinking these thoughts all alone, so we attempt to browbeat those around us into accepting our view of things. If everyone else believes it, it must be true, and we are all but guaranteed of ending up in the happy place. Ahhh.
To my way of thinking, this is religion in a nutshell.