In America, we are fortunate, that we are given the freedom to believe or not to believe in any particular religious profession that we wish and this is the way that it should be. Each of us should have the right to follow the faith or non-faith of our desires and that right is important to have, because the paths that each of us take of faith or not, are different, because we are each our own person. Having said that, there is a fundamental world of difference between someone that believes that he is an immortal soul encased temporarily in a physical body on an earthly plane as compared to a person that doesn't believe he is anything other than a physical body that happens to have a mind that is able to think.
The issue with believing that you are only a physical being and nothing else is that if your belief is only in the physical, than your outlook specifically on life, your life, the meaning of life, and life and death, will, because of this belief, be diametrically different from he who believes that he is, above all, a soul. The fact of the matter is, if your belief is that the physical is all that matters, than it is hard to find a reasonable justification for wasting both precious time and energy on matters that are not tangible to a physical being. This means, as a body with a mind, you would be much more inclined to care specifically about physical pleasure and ego gratification, to the exclusion of most everything else.
For those that believe only in the physical, when dear friends die, and they all die physical deaths, there are often tears of despair, as well as of love, of seeing one that once was so vibrant and whole, being laid to rest. The death of a love one is very real, and should never be discounted, yet, if one understands that we are all souls, and not bodies, and that the very person that we loved and cared for so much still very much exists, but not in a material form, it makes for a dramatically different experience. The physical body is mortal, that is its nature, and that nature, no matter how many surgeries, no matter how many pills, no matter how many machines are hooked up to that body, will, at the end of the day, expire. The soul, which is what we really are, is immortal, which means there was never a time when it didn't exist, and there will never be a time when it will no longer exist.
The conscious recognition that each of us is a soul enables one to have a different perspective on physical life, and subsequently to face physical death, with the courage, faith, and knowledge that we are not this body. Additionally, those that recognize their immortality understand implicitly that their decisions matter, that the death of the physical body, does not stop the process that each of us has to make, which is that we do not die and go to heaven, but rather instead, that our life on earth is a proving ground in which through our actions, and through our choices, we grow our way to heaven.