Paul closed his eyes, hoping to make the incomprehensible Universe disappear into the vacuum from which it had sprung. - Stephen Baxter

Only children chatter of an afterlife. We are nothing but transient dissipative structures. In your cherishing the bone dust of the dead you are seeking to deny the basic truth of existence: that when we die, we are gone.

One might imagine that, in any conflict between rational humans and religious humans, the rational ought to win. After all, it is rationality that invented gunpowder! And yet—at least up to our nineteenth century—the religious tendency has generally won out, and natural selection operated, leaving us with a population of religiously-inclined sheep—it has sometimes seemed to me—capable of being deluded by any smooth-tongued preacher.
The paradox is explained because religion provides a goal for men to fight for. The religious man will soak some bit of “sacred” land with his blood, sacrificing far more than the land’s intrinsic economic or other value.

Life seems to be emergent from the very fabric of the universe that contains us, hardwired into physical law. And so, I suppose, mind is emergent too.