Oh My God!

Believe it or not, being an atheist doen't mean you can't have a God. In fact, it's a good thing to have. But, your God is only your God and nobody else's.

The atheist God is a concept. It's the embodiment of everything you know to be right and good. If you could be the perfect being, by your own standards, that's God. It's something to aspire to, not something to worship or fear or have faith in. You're only going to attribute to God that which you are convinced is true and factual. No need for faith. The reward for "doing God's will" is that you become a better person, since you are actually adhering to what you have established is right. Your behavior is in sync with your thought process and your database of knowledge and wisdom. Your quality of life improves because your judgment becomes more sound.

Of course God will vary from person to person and from year to year within each person as they grow, learn and gain wisdom and insight. Your perception of a perfect being today may not be what it was last year, five years ago, ten years ago. Of course, good people employing logic and reason, with a reasonable capacity for objectively employing both will come to similar conclusions ("great minds think alike"), so after a time, their "Gods" may become quite similar.

Religion is a short-cut. You don't have to develop and manage your own God. You can just use somebody else's. Anything you don't understand or that doesn't seem to compute is just taken on "faith". You don't have to re-evaluate and tweak it. You just believe in it, worship it, fear it and do the bidding of its emissaries in its name. You are a passenger, not a driver and you have no say in your destination.