I never had a higher problem with the HP thing. In NYC there are lots of atheists in the rooms. I am agnostic. My bjection though is two fold. A) it is set up to accept everyone and lead them around to a more uniform conception of HP, and then deny that this is going on. I think you can see this is the various dogmas, the literature, the scholarship B) if it were so simple as picking and choosing a HP and using what works, leaving the rest. But it isn't. Without enough emphasis on personal freedom, there is mission creep and eventually I found myself entertaining all sorts of dogmas. It's the tertiary stuff that always constitutes the religion. Usually not the core beliefs, in this case, that there are things outside of ourselves, a universe, a world, a god for some, that we can contemplate as a way of achieving perspective.