Souls are accidental (but gorgeous all the same)

Sometime in my formative years I gave up on the idea that some part of us, soul, or consciousness, exists after death. My reasons for doing so had nothing to do with my religious skeptism; they had to do with the desire to believe that the universe was really as large, complex, and indifferent to us as modern science tell us it is. I just found this wonderfully pithy expression of the idea by Ian McEwan:

However, [the idea of life after death] divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons, by those who are certain that there is a life, a better, more important life, elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound.

And at some point when I am smarter I will explain not only why this is true, but why it is important to believe so.