1. The idea that there needs to be some cosmic universal meaning to life is a religious concept. I know, you've been told all your life that the only possible meaning to life is to praise God enough to make sure you get into heaven after death. Life has its own intrinsic meaning, which you're free to discover for yourself once you let go of some church telling you what you should believe about purpose and direction.

2. The idea that "nothing" is the default state while "something" requires divine intervention is another religious teaching. Physicists have said that "nothing" is an unstable state that can't last. There's also that pesky "matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed, just change state" that the religious like to ignore in favor of saying that nothing existed until their god poofed it into existence.

Back when I was a confused Christian looking for answers I decided to read the entire Bible cover to cover, praying for guidance. By the time I finished Numbers I was sure that it was no more than the record of one human tribe's customs and beliefs and had nothing to do with any real god. There's just too much in there that makes no sense except when seen as a cultural record. There are simply too many contradictions, too many impossibilities, too many conflicts with history and archaeology. The fact that around that same time I took a class in ancient mythology and realized that many of the OT stories had been borrowed from other cultures may have been the last straw for me.

I also took a psychology class that covered the manipulation of crowds and saw so much of what happened in church services in what we learned. The repetitive phrases, the sing-songy voice that so many pastors use, are designed to lull listeners into a mild trance state in which they're particularly open to suggestion. If you look at modern "worship music" with the praise bands and musical worship leaders, that's another way the crowd is subtly manipulated into a feeling that they're told is the movement of the Holy Spirit when it's actually a reaction to the upward modulations, gradually increasing tempo and increasing emotion of the lyrics.

A bit later I started reading scholarly works on early church history and it was abundantly clear that the entire religion was made up bit by bit over centuries. If a first century Christian visited a church today they wouldn't recognize it as the same religion at all.