I'm sure tapeworms are very interesting if you study them.
Maybe but they aren't exactly indicative of a human-centered universe 
Leprosy would be, though! It completely adapted to being human-only, like, a few million years back or somethin'. Been parasiting on humans so long it literally can't effect other stuff anymore (though it'll ride on a few things, iirc.).
... as for the morality thing, "An' it harm none, do what you will" is more or less the foundation of my moral theory -- I evaluate good or bad on a personal level by whether and to what degree it causes harm. If it doesn't, I give literally zero damns. If it does no
more harm than other, generally accepted actions, damns equally not given. And the harm actually has to be observable and communicable (at least theoretically, if nothing else). Which is to say I don't really get along very well with most religion based morality :V
Is where about a quarter of the irreligion comes from. It's hard to convince me something is wrong without showing me
how it's wrong, and if all the negatives have been ground under the dust by several centuries of scientific and medical advances, well. Eat pigs, we've fixed the issues there as much as we have with most any meat. Sodomize anything that's willing, medical science has fixed potential medical issues, there. Wear mixed fabrics, we don't need bullshit tribal markers anymore. Etc., so forth, so on. Maybe hold off on the slavery and killing and whatnot, though. Keep the good stuff! Just... not the rest.
Metaphysics and whatnot, well, I think they're pretty.
Really pretty. Also mostly (not
entirely, but mostly) useless -- the exact nature of the universe is mostly irrelevant, since we're entirely limited by physical constraints (which may or may not be an illusion, but there's no way of actually
telling and how you should act in any given situation is completely uneffected by whether it is or isn't, so...) in how we observe and interact with whatever's there.
A world with or without gods appears the same to us. With or without souls, with or without an actual physical reality, with or without an afterlife or reincarnation, with or without objective morality, or free will, or whatever. The list just kind of spreads on into comprehensiveness. Metaphysics is important and useful strictly to the extent it influences actual action.
Which, to be fair, is not an entirely unnotable amount -- as one of my professors liked to say, "metaphysics precedes ethics." The structure of the latter will be mostly determined by the structure of the former. BS like the just world nonsense a
lot of religious theologies encourage would be an example of a negative effect. Stuff like charitable giving/good works and whatnot would be an example of a positive! Just wish more joints in the states actually did that charitably instead of janking it right back into the churches.
Totes okay with giving jackass computers a sense of humor with a me-clone, though. Continuity would be nice, but an infinite chain of frumples going on into perpetuity would be pretty alright, too, even if the first one is dead and gone. Also forks. Forking frumples everywhere. Millions of forked mes, doing all the things a forking horde can. If the future is forking forever, I would be as happy as a forked frumple can be.
A question for the atheists: If you had the option of an afterlife, would you take it?
I would, actually. It would give the potential of enacting revenge upon the divine for the millions of years of suffering their shoddy engineering has inflicted on my species. If an eternity of torture meant just
one chance to stab a bastard responsible for the state of the world in their equivalent to an eye, I'd take it. That's worth it, to me.
I don't think an afterlife exists, and I think if it
did, it would make no difference to how I should act while living (at least without a means of intercommunication, anyway). But I
hope it does, because I've got a list of conceptual entities in the back of my head I want to spend an eternity kicking in their equivalent of reproductive organs. One kick for every ill they've allowed fall upon my people.
