thanks so much for your help! I'm looking for a religion for the exact reasons you describe, it is not acceptable to me that I am believing and practicing whatever I like, worshipping my own worldview. I believe it is morally wrong to not be part of a religious community to which you have to conform yourself and be challenged by, it's wrong to do every single thing exactly as it suits you, and thousands of years of knowledge and tradition probably know better than me anyway. my obstacle in righting what I believe to be the serious moral failing of cultural atheism is that I am unwilling to lie for any reason, and I'm obviously an atheist, so i've been "shopping around" I guess for a religion that would allow me membership even if I don't believe God is a conscious force or being. I don't have any religious background in my family that I can go off of, so I don't just want to arbitrarily pick a religion at random to join, it could be a cult or something for all I know. The only religion I've really heard of is Catholicism (I've also heard of Judaism, Protestant, Muslim, but I don't know what they are other than Protestants are related to Catholics) and I would be happy to become Catholic even though I think I disagree with them a lot -based on the Catholic friend I had- because what do I know about what's right anyway? However, it seems to me that true faith and belief are very important to Catholicism and they wouldn't want me to attend if they knew that I just can't get myself to believe deep down that God is conscious. I've also found that a religious group is the only source of community and shared lifestyle and values, as you said, but as religion doesn't seem to be an option for me, I thought I'd give a shot at finding a community of similarly traditional women in case there was at least some benefit