From Freethought Firefighters International:

Life does matter and I think everyone, even the most devout Christians, realize this in spite of the rhetoric they get from the church.  I think people are not nearly so confident in their hoped for dreams of immortality in a pie-in-the-sky afterlife.  I think this life is very important to people, and that is why they do everything they can to extend it as long as possible, but recognizing the inevitable, they convince themselves that this life is not all that there is.

I love life myself and I hope it lasts for a long time to come, but if it doesn’t, so be it, at least I was alive and did something productive with it by helping others in their times of need; at least I experienced life and had a family.  Whatever our life spans may turn out to be, just being alive is something to be cherished and should never be down-played or seen as unimportant in terms of some hoped for “eternal life.” Death is the natural end to life and while it is sometimes horrific and almost always painful for the surviving loved ones, it is grotesque to assign some special divine significance to it beyond the natural indiscriminate world we inhabit.