Welcome! : )

Look on the Bright side,you don't have to deal with an roman emperor. some of them were pretty stupid. That one guy declared war on the god of the sea,oh what was his name.

"I keep feeling like I woke up..". Typical end to the god delusion.

Neal the real deal, a number of us share several of your experiences. I was a christian for decades and when I became aware that there is no god and the bible is pure fiction I deeply sensed that I had woken up. Zeffd commented that that is typical, which is good to hear. I snapped out of the god delusion in mid 2015 and to this day the best description I have is that I woke up. And the sense you have that your brain is more powerful, I am completely with you. As christians we are taught that doubt and worldly wisdom is of the devil and that we should trust and obey. That creates false barriers and no-go areas of thought and reasoning. When I looked at reality without constriction I saw inter-relationships that I never noticed before. Things that I had missunderstood suddenly made sense.

I disagree with your notion that without god or perhaps without eternal life there is no purpose, and that if we are animals then there is no purpose. I felt identically to the way you think and feel now, but that sense you have and that I had was a product of the brainwashed attitude of christianity. Look at it like this: let's say a creature living 210 million years ago has hatchlings and it cares for its young, but they all die but one. And let's say that the adult creature devotes its life and love and energy to protecting that hatchling. Let's say it provides for that growing offspring and, in accordance with the evolutionary forces that drive us all, teaches its young all that it knows, cares deeply for its offspring, and finally gives its life protecting it. Let's say that young hatchling goes on to mate and raise its own young, and that it wouldn't have been able to without the devotion of that now deseased parent. Perhaps in time its lineage might evolve into an early bird, or perhaps its family line eventually dies out. Regardless, the relationship that the parent and offspring experienced had meaning. The fight for the future had meaning. Things don't take their meaning because the last forever; the young dinosaur was measurably better off because of the caring parent. It suffered less. It enjoyed more. It lived and felt the wind and tasted cool water and inumerable other things that made its life richer. There is meaning here. Whether its lineage lived on, or whether we know or care anything about it, what that parent did had meaning.

Please hear me; we've conclusively shown that life began at least 3.8 billion and probably over 4 billion years ago, and we are directly related to that first self-replicating molecule. The Human Genome Project is one of the conclusive means of demonstrating this. Before that the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, the sun about 4.6 billion years ago from an interstellar nebula. All of the elements (atoms) except for hydrogen and a bit of lithium and helium were made in stars in the time before that, back to the big bang. The big bang was the event that created the original hydrogen atoms that stretch across the known universe. The big bang itself is mysterious, but could have emerged from quantum fluctuations that caused a run away energy expansion that had the exponential effect of inflating the universe at incredible speed. We are literally still in the big bang. Right now. So the universe is explainable without a creator. No god needed.

What about that self-replicating molecule? There are a number of working hypothesis on how the existing amino acids that had already combined in chemical reactions got to the point of self-replicating. Most models indicate it led to RNA molecules, which then could have transitioned to the DNA molecules that constitute all of life today. After lots of time and variation the early single cells combined, led to evolving animals, and they had the simple feature of chemical signaling. That chemical signaling led to nerve cells, which began to form the earliest brains. Brains in animals have evolved with ever greater complexity and finally culminated in our brains and others, which still work on the same signaling mechanism that bacteria use, which is billions of years old. None of this required intelligent design.

A creator would not be so stupid or wasteful as to come up with a reality like this. Practically zero percent of the universe is habitable. Life has been the most colossal scene of suffering imaginable. Consider this; 251 million years ago the earth was covered with advanced mammal-like reptiles, with Listrosaurus being the most numerous. Like in the billions numerous. There were animals that were dog like, gave birth to live young, nursed them and obviously cared for them. One species, Thrinaxodon, was especially caring. It is a rare example of a species that allowed other unrelated species to live in the dens they dug, and thrinaxadons lived in male-female pairs. We would recognize much of its behavior. Then a region known as the Siberian Traps began spewing lava at a rate that poisoned the atmosphere and oceans. About 98 percent of all life died on the planet. The hardest part of the Permian Extinction lasted over 60,000 years, and the whole event lasted millions of years. The misery and suffering was what we picture as hell. Life barely emerged from that. An intelligent designer that cared about his creation would not have done that. I know god's ways are supposed to be different from our ways, but it is unreasonable to think that any of this was necessary 250 million years ago. Before Adam and Eve sinned. Before sin entered the world and brought god's curses. Even if you could believe that you'd have to see that it is not intelligent design.

We can date events in various ways, including with the radioactive decay rate of uranium to lead. As an example, when a certain kind of crystal (zircon) forms it does not allow lead in its presence. Scientists can measure how much new lead has built up in a zircon crystal over time, then use the known nuclear decay rate of uranium to determine exactly when that crystal formed. There are an incredible number of overlapping ways to date given events, so when we analyze fossils, soil strata, meteorites and whatever else we can get pretty close to the actual dates.

I say all of this because I was in a similar circumstance to yours. Please watch Sir David Attenborough's "First Life" program on Youtube (2 hours), debates between leading Christian intellectuals and Christopher Hitchens, watch evolutionary biologist Dr. Richard Dawkins and cosmologist Dr. Lawrence Krauss presentations, along with presentations by the neuroscientist Sam Harris, all on Youtube. The weight of evidence against any outside interference into reality is overwhelming. Arm yourself with knowledge and reasoned argument. Your mind is ready for it, and you'll be free of this anxiety and can fully determine your purpose and meaning in life.

We only have so much time on this earth. The Christian philosophy advises that we discount this life and focus on the life to come. It is the Christian mindset that robs life of all meaning. We are surrounded by distant cousins; every blade of grass, pollen spore that makes you sneeze, dog that barks at you and bug that bites you is your literal cousin. We are in a great a nd wonderful epic journey. Break out of that bronze age mythology and live while you have the chance.