(Stuff I learn or want to say about atheism will go on this page.)
I found these questions at Today Christian; which cites they originally came from http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/10-questions-for-atheists/ . The answers, of course, are my own.
If our bodies are cremated, they're transformed into ash and water vapor. Otherwise, bodies decay into putrid slime, bones, and gases. In time, bones will also crumble. Bacteria, flies, worms, bugs, wind, sunshine, rainwater, pressure, and friction all help to break a corpse down into simpler smaller bits. Some of our bodies' molecules will be absorbed by microorganisms and thus reenter the food chain, to become parts of new plants and animals.
We leave behind our possessions, things that we've helped create or change, and the memories other people have of us. And a dead body. That's it.
Our possessions will belong to other people, and will be theirs, not ours. They will be broken, destroyed, thrown away, and soon lose any connection to our former lives. The things we changed and created will likewise lose their connections to us, and be lost in their turn. People will think of us less, forget us, and they themselves will die. In this modern era, we can expect our names and images to last for centuries, but they won't mean much to our descendants. Entropy can be counted on to eventually erase these remnants of our lives, long after we cease to be relevant to anyone. Thousands of millennia from now, humankind will have even forgotten that Shakespeare, Hitler, or Jesus ever existed.
Our minds and personalities? They're just programs that run on meat-computers called brains. A brain starved of oxygen for only a few minutes can permanently destroy that program, that mind, even if the body itself doesn't die. We know this. In the same way that a computer can't run a program after the computer has been seriously damaged, a brain also can't run its program when the brain has been seriously damaged. Or dead. The minds and personalities of dead people simply don't exist anywhere except in the past when they were alive.
And I don't believe in souls at all. Perhaps I'll discuss the topic of souls later. But asking me where the essence of a person goes after death is like asking me where the light goes when a light bulb burns out, or where the swimming goes when a swimmer gets out of a swimming pool.
What I'm trying to say: minds are processes, not tangible things.
And because minds are a function of change, of time, and because our minds and memories change over time, I have a radical idea to toss at you: we're always dying anyway. Where is the child I once was? Where is my teenage self? Where is the person I was in my twenties? Those people no longer exist. All that is left of them are their name (which is also my name), some of their possessions, some of their memories which I also inherited (and not strong reliable memories either), and other people's memories of them. It's not much different from death, isn't it? Except that they didn't leave a dead body behind.
But really, my younger selves are gone. I have inherited their name and things and legacy, sure, but they are as dead as my final self shall be. Should I expect to see any or all of them in Heaven? I find it strange that no one mentions this as even a possibility.
(By the way: If you think that my answer to this question is depressing, you haven't thought it through enough. Consider any reunion with friends or family. They too are not the people that your former selves knew, but the inheritors of those people. They too are changing. Their former selves are also gone forever. We're all working with faulty memories of the people we used to be.)
First, thanks for putting "Hell" in all-caps, just to make it more scary looking.
Sorry, but what miracles? I don't know of any actual miracles.
Okay, sure, I've heard that Jesus walked on water, replicated loaves and fishes, bought Lazarus back from the dead and cheated death himself. I think I've also heard of a priest that flew. But I treat these as stories, not facts. For example, in the story of The Three Little Pigs, the pigs build themselves houses and talk to the wolf using English, but the story is hardly evidence that actual pigs can build and talk.
And why would people tell stories about miracles if they weren't true? Darned if I know. None of us alive today witnessed Jesus's supposed miracles and we can't even prove for sure that Jesus of Nazareth even existed. All the stories about Jesus could be completely made up. My best guess is that there probably was a prophet named Jesus way back then, but the people who wrote later about him perhaps embellished his deeds to make him look better. Or maybe we're the victims of a historical game of "Chinese Telephone" where his life story got changed drastically in the retellings before anything got written down. Who knows what really happened? It's impossible to tell.
Consider how today, sometimes people try to merge the various Biblical women in Jesus's adulthood into one woman: Mary Magdalene. Is it possible there were multiple prophets running around at the same time, and bits and pieces of all their stories got merged together into the one Jesus that we think we know?
As for things like the saint who flew, again, I wasn't there, so I don't know what really happened. But storytelling has all sorts of tricks it can use. What if his "flying" was a metaphor for something else more prosaic? Think about how we use language. We can say something like "The Atlanta Bears slaughtered the Cleveland Wildcats" and know from our cultural standpoint that we're talking about sports teams where the team from Atlanta won the match decisively. But someone reading this out of context might think we're talking about grizzy bears gruesomely killing mountain lions. How do we know that the original story of the flying priest wasn't also indulging in some sort of metaphor? His "flying" might've been "flights of fancy" where he merely daydreamed a lot and confused his contemporaries with a lot of nonsensical stories.
As for the rest of the question, I think there's a lot of roads to self-delusion. Sometimes, I'll meet someone who hears voices or claim they saw a ghost when they were a kid, things like that. And they're not lying, so I try to be polite and just hear them out. But no way do I believe them. In the case with the voices, I think there's been actual brain damage, perhaps from drugs, perhaps from finding reality too painful to face directly, that he's involuntarily created the adult version of "invisible friends". For the guy who saw a ghost, I wonder what he really saw. A reflection of something else? Fog? The light hitting background objects in a weird way? Was he taking medication at the time? Was he hallucinating from a gas leak or from an allergic reaction?
It's hard to argue against other people's experiences. They had unusual experiences that they truly believed happened. Under stressful circumstances, I once lost my eyesight for a minute or so. I can explain what it was like, but I can hardly prove it.
I barely know of them. I've heard their names, of course, and I know they're outspoken self-appointed spokespeople for atheism, but nothing much beyond that.
Because inventing a religion is easy. Or, at least, it's a lot easier to make stuff up and retell stories than to research biology or physics. People love telling stories. It's one of our favourite ways to pass along information and ideas. And the older religions have had centuries to embellish their stories with lots and lots of new details.
People also love to anthropomorphize everything. We can't help but see faces on random objects; every dot or blob is a potential "eye"; every curved line is a potential "mouth". We also project personalities onto things. Our toasters hate us. We talk of "Nature" or "Fate" as if they were actual women.
We're also hardwired to be social creatures; we understand emotions a lot easier than we understand mathematics or statistics.
So I find it very easy to understand that when primitive peoples asked themselves "where did everything come from? why are we here? where will we go when we die?", they looked at the sun and invented a sun god. Or looked at the sky and invented a sky god. Or looked at a river and invented a river god. And they then gave those gods stories, stories that would give answers to those difficult questions. It is easier by far to tell oneself friendly bedtime stories than to come up with premises and devise experiments and then carry out those experiments to prove or disprove a premise.