That seems a bit short of an accurate summation of the entire human species, bobgo.
Not every person involved in religion is anguished.
Equally, simply being defined as a thing which remedies anguish does not exclusively outline religion; there are many remedies for anguish in this world other than aspects within religions.
Atheism, equally, is not a dismissal of any remedy. As I pointed out above, there are several religions which are atheistic religions.
Atheist simply means there is a lack of belief in divine beings; many religions have no such concept of divine beings in their conception of reality.
Equally, stating that Atheism is the refusal of the remedy implies that the remedy is theism, and equates all religion to theism; which is not an accurate description of the human species’ history and current standing with religion as a whole.
Based on the end of your post, you appear to be speaking, instead, about the difference between a physicalist and a metaphysicalist rather than atheism and religion.
In the post I made, I proposed a challenge:
“For fun, next time someone asks if you are religious, answer yes and omit that you are not theistic and see if they continue the conversation as if you just stated that you were theistic.”
Your post context applies to this. Your assumptions of the inheritance of the words to the concepts you link to them are based on a very exclusive struggle of frustration that you are proxy to by the culture surrounding you.
However, I would propose, that furthering this non-inherent link between these concepts to these words only actually festers the frustration that you are describing as needing to be addressed to resolution.
Perhaps it could be more advantageous to look at the terms for what they are, and look at people without requiring to fit but a few categorical labels to all variations of human behavior spiritually and existentially; as the human species is far more diverse than a dichotomic range of interpersonal relationships with reality, subjugated to only binary expression.
In human behavior, isolating the options to only one or the other tends to create more confrontation and outburst in recipients than it does aid to reduce such confrontation, as humans do not typically feel quantifiable in two fractions of a matter which is as diverse as the human biology is in regards to emotional scope.
And the human emotional scope is far more elaborate than simply two options, and as such most will not feel adequitly expressed by the scope of religion vs atheist, and especially not when the former is described as only a remedy for anguish (which not every devoted adherent to all of the religions of the world adheres for) and the latter is only described as a denial of that remedy (which blankets all atheists as denialist even though there are plenty of religious atheists in this world, and not every non-religious atheist feels religion is to be denied, but simply does not believe in divine beings, or may not have any emotional impulse to drive them to search for a religion).
Also, I wouldn’t assert that religions pretend to know a transcendent truth.
It would be more appropriate to assert that religions believe that they have a transcendent truth of some fashion.
Of course, I could assert this about philosophy as well, so this is not unique to religion, but it is religion that marries a reverence to the concept whereas philosophy has a history of attempting to hold nothing within its tomes as sacred or revered.
This, then, is the separation: for religious pursuits emotional logic is applicable and accepted; in many cases it is the foremost employed logic, whereas for philosophical pursuits emotional logic is unacceptable and considered to be illogical.
If these two ways of reasoning confront, they will inherently be on differing lexicons of the language in which they use and the assumptions of how a person should reason; thereby making it very difficult for the two schools of thought to pass by each other while addressing human conception.
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