If I said yes, I'd caveat that by saying, "we're not special." There's no interaction, quid pro quo or otherwise, with whatever presence, energy, or overmind that I would conceptualize as a deity.

Not an architect. Not a creator. Omnipotence and omniscience defy temporality. There are, similarly, no subdivisions of the deity; there are no places that it is present, and others that it is absent. No underboss gods, angels, demons, heavens, hells, or purgatories.

The deity, in my understanding, is simply a unity: An answer to paradoxes, a solution to the incomprehensible, a layer beneath and above all other measurements, concepts, and capacities. A holographic whole that encompasses and inhabits every possibility. It is older than the universe and beyond our feeble attempts to comprehend it, let alone write its character and tell its story.

A bearded white dude who impregnated a virgin, hates masturbation, holds vendettas, destroys cities, sends plagues, and permits humans to hide from "HIM" in the garden of good and evil... it is all just silly by comparison. At that's just from the tradition I was raised in.

I mean, a burning bush? Or tests of faith?

We, people and all other organisms that are aware of one another, need to get on with finding ways to coexist. Biodiversity is the scorecard.

/rant

I think the metric is different per individual. Progress. I have settled, after years of wonder and experiencing, that we are indeed in a the most incredible classroom. An experience machine. We Temporarily inhabit a meat suit perfectly designed to navigate the machine and initiate the types of experiences that bring about the lessons we have opted to learn. Amnesia of self leads to fear of the unknown, which in turn manifests as a fear of death. It keeps us in the classroom, because if we remembered who we are we would leave at the first sign of discomfort or struggle, and fail to learn anything. Because where we come from is pure satisfaction with no duality, and doesn’t suck. The story of the meat suit is evolution, at some point we just hop into one.

Yeah, I mean it depends a lot on what you think the purpose of the experiment is, right? I take a somewhat simplistic view at the big-picture scale: I want to live, therefore it's better to be alive than dead, therefore continuing to be alive is exceeding my expectations and counts as a win in my book. But it's more complicated once you get into the weeds of 'purpose' and such. For me I think there is no point or purpose to life beyond it as itself, we're just a particularly complex chemical soup cast adrift in the universe left to work shit out for ourselves. But what that means is that I get to decide what everything means including life itself, and since I want to continue living and creating meaning I have decided that that means I am accomplishing my purpose in life. Yeah the world sucks and all that, but it is still populated by people and people are what matter; we can make the world a better place by improving the lives of those who live here by reducing the amount of suffering in it. As Camus says, the struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart.

No, I think we don't deserve life.