I don't find the word 'meaning' very useful since it serves so many purposes in this context. I prefer to think about causality. What I do or don't do is governed by how I think my actions will effect myself and those people and things around me. I assess whether those potential impacts are good or bad according to what I think is good or bad. As to whether those effects actually matter, I think that depends on locality. For me it's a slam dunk that actions do matter when space and time locality are restricted to this planet and the near future (i.e. 1-2 generations from now). Actions I take can effect those near to me, but they can also act a distance of a few thousand miles. I'm part of a social structure and how I act is part of how that structure acts and that social structure has a significant impact on how generations evolve. Actions I take can effect the environment and by extension, the environment can effect things and people far from me. If I extend that and look at the implications of actions I take across vast tracts of time or space then I'm not comfortable saying those actions are irrelevant because we have causality affecting anything within the light cone effected by my actions. Whether that causality is significant, i.e whether an action I take has a significant (or any) effect downstream seems incredibly difficult to judge. Effect seems like a chain to me, and every cause and effect on the path to a final state like a link. We're on many of these links, even if they seem small and irrelevant.
...oh, and I don't think my actions would have less significant causality if they were the result of having faith. I don't think peoples acts are less or more important or have less or more meaning just because they have a different frame of reference to others.
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