Everything in this post is a personal viewpoint and not intended to invalidate anyone else's point of view.
Like any philosophical question, there are a few ways of looking at it; I do not have the knowledge or the understanding to go through every single one of these, so bear with my potted history of Theology. A theistic point of view which takes one or many Gods to be omnipotent and omnibenevolent might pose that the purpose of life is to please God and attain a blissful understanding of the world in the 'next' life, as indicated by Plato's Cave. Socrates pokes a hole in this: if God is good and orders us to do something bad, the bad thing becomes 'good' because God ordered it. This, obviously, is not consistent with reason. If our goal in life is to please God, then we may ultimately become amoral in life.
Some theologies develop this with the assertion that God is good, and Satan poses as a Godly figure to fool us into amorality. This is quite a Puritan point of view, and literature like The Scarlet Letter points out that we eventually come full circle, and 'pleasing God' involves actively shunning members of our community who displease God. Biblical teachings vary wildly (see: God's treatment of Abraham which directly contrasts the Ten Commandments), but most people nowadays would suggest this does not correspond with a liberal Christian viewpoint - nor is it moral. Here, we end up examining very diluted interpretations of the text. They are diluted through translation and transcription, but most importantly through culture. If I may switch briefly to British Literature, Chaucer provides insight into 1300s English religious practises. Only the educated are allowed to read The Bible because it is written in Latin and spoken about in French, which means that although medieval Britain was the furthest thing from secular (Divine Right of Kings, anyone?), most laypersons who went to church and paid their tithes heard what they were supposed to be doing via sermons. This means that religion could be manipulated by a particularly self-serving member of the clergy, as explored in Chaucer's The Parson's Tale (note: if you read it, read it in Middle English and translate it yourself before using a translation).
So, that's blind faith briefly explored: blind faith inevitably becomes amoral. It is a reductionist approach and reduces people to existing, rather than living.
I will jump here to the modern day, and Richard Dawkins. Unfortunately, I cannot write about Richard Dawkins without a bias, because I think he is narrow-minded and pretentious, so do take this paragraph with a grain of salt. Richard Dawkins has one purpose in life, it would seem: prove religion is "stupid". Good for Dawkins, he found his purpose... That doesn't really give those of us who disagree with him anything to work with, and unfortunately - given that he won't entertain anyone with a differing viewpoint - we can't look to him for answers. Richard Dawkins writes the Gospel of Empiricism and preaches it with the same blind faith for which he criticises people who preach religion. Don't get me wrong: empiricism is the cornerstone of learning, but excuse me if I claim it is not the cornerstone of Science. As McGrath points out in Mere Theology, nothing we learn when we sit through a lecture on Natural Science came into being in a perfect, untarnished, empirically proven state. Everything we are taught was once someone's hypothesis. So, when Dawkins says that we can believe nothing that isn't empirically proven, he closes himself off to advancement. There is no empirical proof supporting God, but we can't disprove God, either; McGrath calls this a working hypothesis. An interesting tidbit here, and slightly tangential, is that Dawkins uses a meta-analysis of all things when framing religion as having a "negative correlation" with intelligence. Anyone who has given psychology a cursory glance will know that meta-analyses are not primary research and have a huge capacity for being framed. Someone who has worked extensively with people in a pastoral setting will also be able to tell you that intelligence cannot be accurately measured on a scale.
So, Dawkins doesn't help. Here is where I am going to talk about the two things that have properly helped me understand why I feel I'm here. The first is The Color Purple by Alice Walker. A disclaimer here is that I am white and British: I cannot claim to understand racism in 1930s America because it is something I am privileged enough never to have experienced. When I was eight, I was a chorister. That meant I was in church for musical and religious training on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Going through the choir stalls and past the altar, there was a large, stained-glass window, and God and Jesus were both on it. They were both white, and they were both men. That's one out of four points for accuracy, which roughly translates as an 'F'. I looked around at the white, predominantly middle-class congregation and didn't think there was anything out of the ordinary. When I was 12 - a year before I finished my 'work' (we did get paid £1 per rehearsal, 20p for staying to work with the adult choir and £10 for weddings, but don't tell the authorities that), I began to realise a few things: I was clever, I was undeniably female, and I was gay. In my Anglo-Catholic Church, all of these things were accepted, but there was nothing for me to identify with. This is where Walker comes into play.
God is not white or male. Jesus was not white. Walker explores this in the very middle of The Color Purple, summing it up with (paraphrased) "I think God gets annoyed when you see the color purple and don't stop to appreciate it". That is the most physical description Walker gives us of God, and I like that postmodern view far more than the anthropomorphic one which gives God a form. In this way, I do agree with Dawkins that we can find awe outside of scripture, but I truly can't believe that there is nothing spiritually compelling about the world. When I walk into a place of worship, the safety I feel cannot be empirically proven by anyone but me, but I believe it's special.
However, this just gives a way of looking at life. The final piece of the puzzle for me (personally) was a TED Talk by Casey Gerald called 'The Gospel of Doubt'. In spite of the name, this is not an explicitly religious piece. Casey Gerald founded 'MBAs Across America', which was why he was invited to TED. At the talk's conclusion, he tells the audience that "[he] had closed down MBAs Across America and shed the staff". He didn't do this in a sudden turn of mean-spiritedness that would put Charles Dickens to shame. He did this because the day after sitting in a room full of CEOs who - between them - owned a great deal of the world's wealth, he went to Harlem and met a man who did not have a salary because he put all of his money into providing homeless teens with what might be their only meal in a day. He closed down the organisation because he saw what he had done on the first day, "and it was good", and on the second day he saw what he had not done. Casey Gerald implores the audience not to need permission to help: people in desperation need help from whoever is there, and if you happen to be there, you help.
To conclude, I think my purpose in life is to look at what's good on the earth and let it remain good, but to understand that miracles do not incite social change as much as people do, and start to bring about that social change without permission from scripture or government or authority. In my belief, if the second coming happens, it will not happen in order to fix something we already have the skills to fix.
(If you've read this far: thanks, sorry, and you don't get a prize for guessing what I want to read at university)
