Look, you have a caricature of believers. I think that most believers in this forum are not as you think, we do not believe in afterlife because we want that life has meaning and because we believe that if there is not afterlife, life has no meaning, but at least in my case I have examined the empirical evidence, both the neurological and psychic data and I have concluded that the most likely is that exists some sort of personal afterlife. Many psychic researchers in the past started out as skeptics and ended up being believers of an afterlife, by the evidence, not by desires.
But is it really a caricature? Are there any believers out there who think it's perfectly possible to live a full and meaningful life even if there's no afterlife, God, libertarian free-will or special psychic powers? If there are, then I'm wrong and I'll shut up.
All the believers I know and read seem to think that 'ultimate meaning/purpose' is impossible unless there's an afterlife. In this, they agree with fundamentalist Christians like William Lane Craig. Unfortunately, though, Nagel showed forty years ago that ultimate meaning is impossible no matter whether there's an afterlife or not. It's an incoherent idea.
Whenever you hear believers saying that on materialism/atheism there's no meaning, freedom or value you know that they're making the mistake Nagel put his finger on all those years ago. They're making exactly the same mistake that fundamentalists always make. They think that on atheism/materialism there's nothing but death, hopelessness and despair. Yet they never give any decent arguments for this.
Generally speaking, believers have such a negative view of atheism/materialism that they will do anything to avoid the conclusion that it's true. This is why I'm extremely suspicious of them.
And note, it doesn't quite work the other way. Yes, some atheists have tried to argue that atheism is preferable to theism. But merely preferring atheism to theism is quite different from the believer's position. Nagel thinks that atheism is a little bit better than theism. He doesn't think that if theism is true then we might as well all go and kill ourselves.
In other words, there are versions of theism that the atheist could live with quite happily, even though they obviously don't think they're true. For the believer, however, there is no version of atheism/materialism that they could accept. There is only death and despair over there.
Alex, for one, is definitely the kind of believer I'm talking about. We can see this by the way he loves to give that Albert Camus quote about atheism and suicide whenever he gets the chance. Fundamentalists like Craig do exactly the same thing. They love to quote Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche and Russell on the meaninglessness of everything on atheism. Yet philosophy moves on! After Nagel, philosophers don't take these arguments seriously any more. Camus was wrong.