>>I have absolutely zero religious faith,
What is at the center of your universe then? Do you believe in chaotic randomness that creates you and the next guy and then you feel a societal need to cooperate based on your shared experience as nothing special?
The universe doesn't have a center.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/GR/centre.html
In 1927 Georges Lemaître found solutions of Einstein's equations of general relativity in which space expands. He went on to propose the Big Bang theory with those solutions as a model of the expanding universe. The best known class of solutions that Lemaître looked at were the homogeneous solutions now known as the Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) models....
Waitaminute. Were you speaking metaphorically?
Never mind.
Okay, enough levity (thank you very much, I'll be here all week, be sure to tip you server).
The center of my universe is my family, friends, and country.
Do you believe in chaotic randomness that creates you and the next guy and then you feel a societal need to cooperate based on your shared experience as nothing special?
In other words, what is the meaning of life, yes? Beyond the obvious answer of "42", we all individually determine it. Many (most?) choose to follow the beliefs of religions of various sorts for the answers. In my case, I've been influenced by my parents and various authors whom I found persuasive, the most prominent among them being Robert A. Heinlein and Ayn Rand.
‘Do you believe in chaotic randomness that creates you and the next guy and then you feel a societal need to cooperate based on your shared experience as nothing special?’
what created myself and the next guy is a natural process known as sexual conjugation, which is a necessity for propagation in the natural world; propagation itself is the prime biological directive in this world...there is little, if anything, random in the state of nature; its strictures are rigid and defined...regarding interpersonal cooperation as a social premise, I believe that shared experiences and empirical observances of how such cooperation improved the state of mankind from a tribalized bare existence to a civilized prosperity...any primacy ascribed to metaphysical interaction is, IMHO, superfluous...