Reddit mentions of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour

I hear you, brother. While freedom of religion does tend to include freedom from religion here in America, the loss of social interaction and camaraderie that crops up when one goes ardently atheist or agnostic can be a problem, especially if one was raised in a culture that conditioned, instructed, socialized and normalized them to intra-cultural codependency... as most cultures do to varying degrees.

I had to get way into the study of comparative religion from outside the box of belief in order to specialize in a rapidly growing niche field of psychotherapy for those who have exited the more extreme forms of belief generally called "cults" (though the definition of that term encompasses a great deal more than "fringe religions").

I hope that seeing the cover of this old vinyl music album helps a bit to clarify that I understand the conflict.

My "empirically observant, (hopefully) rigorously scientific" mental identity understands the concepts outlined in articles like this one and has no inclination to want to be part of anything like that or this or this, of course. But well beyond that, I've no willingness to subscribe to beliefs of any kind (if interested, see this and/or this in my reply to the OP on that thread).

Nor does my mind care for the overweening, possibly drama-addicted and counter-dependent, dog-with-a-rag-in-its-mouth, stridence of atheists like Dan Godless Barker or Richard The God Delusion Dawkins. (Though it can and does make plenty of room for what thy have had to say.) As a result, I have had to come to terms with being All By Myself -- at least intellectually -- and ambiguity- and conflict-tolerant enough of what the rest of humanity (save for yourself and a few others) believe that isn't so whacked out that I cannot tolerate being in their presence.

And while that's not always a comfortable space, I have been able to come to terms with it by understanding such concepts as Stan & Carolyn Block's "requirements" (a keystone feature of their Mind-Body Bridging system), Arthur Deiman's notions on Personal Freedom: On Finding Your Way to the Real World, his buddy Charles Tart's Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential, Joel Kramer's The Passionate Mind and two dozen of Jiddu Krishnamurti's game changers including As One Is: To Free the Mind from All Conditioning and Freedom from the Known.

It may well be for you, btw, that Sufis like Rumi, Khalil Gibran and Idries Shah, as well as "semi-Sufis" like George Gurdjieff, will provide both increasing release and comfort. IDK4S, OC, but I hope you'll do what one needs to do to "rise up through the fog" (as the famous American band, the Jefferson Starship put it many years ago, using metaphors from author Carlos Castaneda), stay out of the mental quicksand and yet be okay with the limitations of others less fortunate than yourself.