What is missing from a life lived without a creator God?

It seems a clear lesson of the past century that it is possible, it may even become normal (and "official" to live a human lifespan without any belief in a creator God: to live, that is, in a reality that is "accidental" and has no ultimate purpose - hence no meaning. 

This is something new as an accepted, assumed normal in human history. It is perhaps surprising that people, and societies, function at all when such beliefs are nigh universal. 

What this fact of at-least partial functionality implies, is that a great deal of life operates at a "close-up" level, of here-and-now, getting-by etc. This might e termed our "emotional life". 

And that the next (and more abstract and general) level of explanation, is what might be termed ideology; some kind of "system" (which may have the form, although seldom the motivational strength, of a religion) is now the "deepest" type of thinking. 

I think this is a fair description of the modern West: ordinary emotional life, is most of what happens; but this is interpreted and planned in terms by some kind of an ideology that underpins it. 

And ideology is the bottom-line. 

What is more; ideology draws its "justification" from the emotionality of ordinary life in a circular fashion - in the sense that each ideology justifies itself in terms of claims that it makes ordinary, everyday, emotional life better. 

Thus emotions are the ultimate justification for everything: everyday and ideological. 

And - among emotions - especially the "hedonic" emotions are primary: a scale of happiness-misery, pleasure-pain, gratification-aversion. 

In other words Life is mortal life only, and everything in mortal life is temporary; "therefore" what matters, both superficially and also as deeply as people can go, is how we feel about things. 

This is the universal life of the modern West; and the disagreements and conflicts of the modern West (at pretty much every level and form of discourse, from interpersonal to geopolitical) are all:

1. Primarily related to rival claims concerning how to make people feel better about things - and

2. Secondarily; the disputes are about who (which persons or groups) have the strongest claim to be made to feel better.  

(Note that even these disputes are rooted in emotions - for instance the claim that people or groups who were most miserable in the past have the highest claim on future happiness; or disputes over which class of persons (sex, race, nation etc) has an intrinsically higher claim to happiness.)

I regard this life of ours, now, as an inevitable consequence of removing purpose and meaning. 

The first thing to be noticed is that it is not stable but instead always changing, always in a state of dissolution...

Plus or minus claims of compensatory new forms of organization - but these claims to be building seem not to be absolutely necessary to justify destruction: it seems that people can be and are motivated to destroy what are perceived as obstacles to emotional improvement, even when there is no idea of why or how new forms and systems are going to be better. 

All of this makes pretty clear that people now do not join-up their assumptions with the consequences of those assumptions. This disconnection of Life - which we see everywhere - is, I think, a consequence of that original decision to delete a creator God as the bottom line. The decision, that is, to live without purpose - and therefore without meaning. 

What is interesting is that the situation is self-sustaining. Once one has decided to put emotions as the bottom line, then anything that diminishes emotional gratification, or is considered likely to do so, is resisted with all zeal of bottom-line ideology, backed by personal fear of misery.

When the bottom line of a creator God is gone; then life is not just disconnected as a fact; but as a moral principle.