I don't think you're not a 'True™' atheist, Onesimus. There's no award to win at day's end; there's nothing to prove to anybody.
We humans, we're social creatures. Irrespective of religious involvement in the framing of a context, we're social creatures; tribal animals to the spitting definition of it. As humans, we tend very strongly to find social patterns and model our behaviours after them, and our mindsets; the very metastructures of our perceptions; adapt and shape to the conventions we both consciously apply to ourselves in an active fashion as well as those we reject. Moreover, there are any number of subcontexts we're rarely to never conscious or aware of that we never-the-less react to, and those play a role in our social adaptations too.
Religion, in this sense, is a lot like drugged water. We need water to live; we need to socialize to live. Really, we do; prolonged isolation and even greatly limited contact with other people has some pretty alarming effects on not merely our cognitive forms, but our very means of cognitive function, our emotional states, even our physical health. And it doesn't have to be literal isolation either; perceived isolation, even if its just removal of a familiar point of contact with no comparative replacement, can have similar effects as isolation, usually in the short term.
So, with religions of many varieties, we get a package deal, including some things we need that have nothing to do with religion at all and are not exclusive to religious providence what-so-ever. We need to socialize, we need our senses of otherness in contrast to self, we need (to arguable and varying extents) the emotional interplay of engaging with others.
We need those as much as we need water for entirely different, but no less certain, reasons. What we don't need is a drug in the water or religion as a motive or a cornerstone enabling our social pursuits.
It could well be argued that atheism is the hardest cup of water to drink in that framing. It doesn't replace frameworks of faith-based perceptions; it removes them, and if they're replaced with rational, fact-oriented information and knowledge and thoughts and feelings contrasted with known quantities, it won't feel familiar because the whole scope and conceptual nature has not only been changed, but is heavily dependant on you to contruct it. Atheism doesn't come with all that many emotionally fulfilling points; we have to define those by our own cognitive and emotional metrics, or we wind up feeling pretty adrift.
And there's a fairly simple reason for why; we need our senses of purpose and belonging, of role and of identity. In that capacity, religion does an alarmingly good job of handing it all to you on a silver platter, so to say; here's your role, this is your purpose, these are the explanations of why, this is what it means and here are all these people that, in accepting all of this, you'll be able to relate to at least on this level.
There's a lot of stuff in what religion offers that people really do need. Unfortunately for religions, it isn't the doctrine or the calcified iron-age moral perspectives, the guilt, the fear or the shame that reinforces and gives personal dimension to a great many of the supposedly positive elements. As a drug in the water, religion creates the disease and numbs the pain it, itself, brought on.
But the process is interactive. We need interaction, both internally as cognitive, sapient creatures as well as externally with other things and people. Atheism doesn't replace that process, and in the absence of even an ultimately damaging process, no process at all is pretty empty. There is nothing out there to talk to; nothing looking in on you; nothing that loves you -or- hates you.
For people that aren't accustomed and have never in all their lives been encouraged to become accustomed to constructing those processes via other channels and finding those interactions elsewise, it can be a very depressing, lonely and hollow-feeling experience, to deconvert. They might well go right back to their religion, even if they can't stand it, because it feels like -something-.
I can assure you that religion doesn't have a special monopoly on that something. We have to be distinctly proactive in creating it for ourselves though, and we don't have any grand, unifying causes or rallying points for tribal formation to culturalize around. In a church setting, you've got at least the potential to feel connected by a common cause or purpose or perspective (or all of the above) to people around you as ratified by a lot of things to sit and probably not talk about so much, but merely to take comfort in taking for granted.
People like the security of things they can take for granted, and I'm not using 'take for granted' in its pedestrian connotation of negativity. I'm referencing certainty, security, absolution, affirmation, confirmation and correlation as platforms for empathy, sympathy and mutual basis for experience.
Atheism doesn't come with any of that. If religions were operating systems on a computer, Atheism is like the most stripped-down linux kernel on the planet; it does nothing and offers you nothing if you don't program it yourself, and that can be bloody well hard. You will almost certainly need other peoples' help to do it unless you're some kind've super-excellent programmer...but if you're a super-excellent programmer, there's a good chance you've been programming your own tools anyway and will not be facing such a debacle.
Freedom is not what some would like to imagine. It isn't an emotionally stirring symphony rising and falling as the credits roll and the hero in the story rides off into a sunset.
It's standing there in silence that will remain silent until you change it doing nothing until you do something, knowing nothing until you learn something, going nowhere until you set forth for any or no reason that you fancy at all.
You will almost certainly wind up going 'What now?' and feeling despair of it, quite possibly more than once. Find your people, make a place for yourself, ask yourself some hard questions and accept nothing less than the certainty only you can provide in their answering though, and you can make it smashingly.
Who do you want to be? What will matter to you, and why? What are you curious of? What will you care about? What do you like, and dislike; why?
You're building yourself up from...not nothing; you've a whole lifetime of experiences and thoughts and feelings that all roll up into a pile of tools to work with in defining who you are and why you are that and what is and is not important to you and so on, but it takes practice to become proficient with those tools. It really does. And some things, you may not quite be able to bring yourself to abandon that you acquired from religion.
You might feel shame over it. You might imagine that you're a 'bad Atheist' because you're still comforted by the sneaking suspicion that there are invisible beings out there somewhere, even if you wrestle with what they might be and what they might want and so on. We're imaginative creatures; powerfully imaginative. If we're being reasonable with ourselves, and honest with ourselves, we don't abuse ourselves for making what we might suppose are mistakes, though.
We acknowledge that growth doesn't, and really can't, all just magically happen at once. Things like deconverting from religion might happen abruptly and might feel sudden, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Its a very dramatic and probably emotionally jarring thing for some...and when the dust settles and the drama of the moment is long gone, there you still are, looking at the operating system of yourself that does nothing and has nothing going on on that blank screen except for one little blinking cursor in the top left corner and a keyboard of your cognitive sapience at your fingertips.
It isn't convenient. It sure as all get-out isn't easy or necessarily fun.
But it is, very powerfully, the way you get to decide who you are and why you are that and what means what to you on your own terms to as fine a degree as you want.
You're not a 'bad atheist' if you look at what prefabricated systems of belief offer and copy things that you like -because you like them-. You're an atheist, not a scientist; you don't have to be rational. You're a human first; humans aren't always rational and, frankly, trying to be will make you a pretty miserable human in terms of how poorly that's probably going to work out.
You're an atheist, not an obligated upholder of sacred Darwinian tenents. Do you really like faeries? Does it amuse and entertain you to imagine that there are invisible faeries in the world that play pranks on people and carve snowflakes into their shapes? Are you willing to accept the reality that just because you like it and it amuses you and it has emotional value to you that it has no bearing on reality for anyone else or being correct outside your own whim and fancy? Go ahead and believe in faeries. Be happy with your musings and your decorations and your ...I dunno, stories or poems or paintings or little rituals of leaving treats out for them that the cat probably eats if you like.
It's ok to be human. Moreover, it's ok to change your mind. Maybe, where you're at right now, you need to believe in something that you don't know how to replace with anything else.
Maybe you need some notion of a god-figure to emotionally deal with things. Compare it to an operating system again; maybe you need some training wheels to get your system functioning and had to import some things from MicroJesus Express to cover some things you just don't know how to replace and remain functional with yet. Can you change your mind later?
Of course. But...what if you're happy with this cobbled-up hybrid of some stuff you've pieced together yourself and all this other stuff you imported from MicroJesus Express?
Are you a bad atheist if...you're actually happy with that? If it really works for you and you're not hurting or impugning anyone with it at all?
Might not be the best sort of position to make compelling statements from in debate with some purist system guru that's custom coded their whole system, but is that a requirement to be a functional, reasonably happy human being?
Do you need to be that kind of purist system guru right away even if you'd like to have that kind of self-awareness and metacognitive faculty and self-certainty to be able to be like that?
No. That frequently takes time, a lot of hard work and a lot of struggling; it's a process that's never finished either.
So, there's my...ohhh...sixty eight cents worth of thought on that.
