If you're an Atheist, what comforts you?

[Dragonfly]

@OP Q
The same things that comfort the religious.  Let's be honest with ourselves....even when you were a believer, when some shitty thing happened in your life, your mind didn't immediately reel to "well, at least I've got god!".

When your tire blew out on the freeway, and you ran off the road...missed your appt, and the wrecker cost an arm and a leg, you probably consoled yourself in the fact that, at least..you didn't die in a fiery crash.  Not in the belief that you'd been saved from the consequences of sin by jesus christ.

Right?

There is no comfort offered by the abrahamic faiths that amounts to anything other than some currently intangible post mortem benefit...but we aren't exactly running off to our deaths, no one is lamenting the fact that they -didn't- get into the fiery crash so that they could exchange their christ token for admittance to the funhouse in the sky.  The faithful and the faithless are simply glad to be alive - and while they may later attribute their survival to some ghost - it isn't the ghost that gave either of them comfort (even if the ghost exists).

My mind actually DID reel to "well, I have God to pray to and help me through this and possibly intervene."

Occasionally, I did believe that sometimes God helped prevent a crash, and I would pray a thank you. BUT it did bother me that when I had breast cancer, people claimed that prayer worked when mine was cured, while all of my friends who died had also had their families praying for them. I noticed that it was God's answer to prayer when things worked out, and God's will when they didn't. That led to some flickering thoughts of whether there's anyone to pray to. 

Actually, in Judaism there isn't much talk about the afterlife. In all of my years of attending a Conservative synagogue, I've never once heard of anyone mention an afterlife. So my comfort from Judaism was not as much from a standpoint of heaven (that was leftover from my Christian upbringing), but more from the structure for living, rituals, community, help processing and healing from difficult events (like the synagogue shooting), the belief in tikkun olam (repairing the world), and other things. Right now I'm wondering if there's enough value in that to want to leave Judaism altogether. But the rituals that we do certain things "as God commanded us to" is troubling because of the things they say are commanded aren't find in the Torah but have been added by rabbis. So an increasing amount of things are prohibited by rabbis that aren't prohibited in the written Torah, so it's getting even more insane to try to tease out what's in the Torah and what's being hashed out by rabbis. And then there's the fact that I don't LIKE the God of the Torah. He's a cruel and sick bastard. So how can I say good things about him in prayer?