If you're an Atheist, what comforts you?

[Cherub786]

Sure, living lives of quiet desperation is our common lot, and we are all subject to moments of despair or ennui, but that's a part of life -- not a necessary result of atheism alone. Religious people, too, experience these things. You paint with too broad a brush. Would it surprise you to learn that even atheist grandparents with gardens can live passionately, grow, learn, and engage in meaningful pursuits? Meditation, to take one example, is not inherently religious and entails no particular belief in this or that book, but it results in exactly the sort of seemingly transcendent experience you mention. I say 'seemingly' because I am of the opinion that such practice results in changes in brain activity-- not breaking through to another spiritual realm. Nevertheless, believing that to be the case in no way reduces the intensity or personal significance of the experience. Such practice is meaningful in and of itself. I simply do not also require a belief that the experience I have be woven into the cosmos or engraved eternally in some god's notice. 

Your objection that we have left behind "the excitement" strikes me as puerile.

As for meditation, it cannot be compared to the kind of worship we do which requires a certain mindset, belief in God, to Whom we direct our complaints, sorrows, beg, cry, and generally debase ourselves. I've never seen that done in yoga or meditation. So how can they result in the same psychological state?

Meditation doesn't bring about an actual improvement in your personality, it's purpose is to achieve calmness and get rid of anxiety. I'm sure that's why loads of people smoke pot too.
Sometimes it's good to feel anxiety and the inner pain, that's what being human is about, that's what being alive is about. I don't agree with those eastern philosophies which are all about numbing oneself to feeling as the way to end suffering.

So I consider such exercises as meaningless and deficient compared to genuine religious mystical experiences and visions.