Unsettled question

One of my far-flung correspondents writes:

In 6th or 7th grade, I was asked what I would do when I die and meet Jesus. Well, obviously if I am actually face-to-face with him, then it would not be a question of believing or not. But since that little fantasy is not actually going to occur, I am not too worried about it. We will all be <ahem> dead; we non-believers won’t have the satisfaction (?) of knowing we were "right" and believers won’t have the disappointment of realizing they were wrong.
    It's not like they'd apologize for their decades of trying to proselytize us. I’m sure that if in death they could look around and see the absolute, utter nothingness, they would still find some way to rationalize that there is a God and that heaven will come, but there must be some...waiting period...or something....

Looking around in death and seeing utter nothingness sounds like an exquisitely terrifying mental hell, infinitely worse than being stuffed into an MRI tube without being told how long the procedure is going to take. Happily (so to speak), neither the believer nor the non-believer will suffer any awareness of nothingness, nor will either know which of them was right, for in death neither will be here (or anywhere else) to experience anything, any more than either was anywhere before birth to experience anything. While we don't count it sad to contemplate all of the beings who might have been born if only all of those eggs and sperm could have gotten together, our having been born brings with it the sadness of our death to come.
    But if any particular sadness of life "tipped the balance" for me it was not the sadness of any personal misfortune, but the general sadness of the food chain, the contemplation that some living creatures get eaten so that other living creatures may live a while longer. The idea that some divine being created such a world was (and remains) so utterly repugnant to me, there was no chance that I, with my exquisite sense of justice for all, could continue to believe in the supposed being who created it. For me and my belief, it's really as simple as that.
    My correspondent reminds me that it was apparently something like that for Charles Darwin, who seems to have left for the voyage on The Beagle a Christian but after seeing "the survival of the fittest" in action couldn't believe that a loving God could be behind it.

If Jesus Christ had a hole in his own moral philosophy, this might have been it. At any rate, to the best of my recollection of the Gospels, all of his reported teachings on compassion were on behalf of humans. His heart seemed not to have been broken by the sacrifice of animals on the cruel altar of worship.
    You might have thought that the Son of the Creator of the Universe wouldn't have had such a myopic, parochial valuation of Creation. Jesus seems to have been a human being even more of his times than we might have thought, however revolutionary his doctrine of human love.