a desire to be free of traditional moral standards
This is off-base. Your morality doesn't necessarily change as you become atheistic; in practice, the only thing that atheistic and theistic people disagree on morally are things like nonheterosexuality, eating meat on certain days of the week, and prayer infrequency, all of which were never strictly immoral in the first place.
To begin with, allow me to make it clear that I wasn't making any sort of ontological moral claim in the particular passage in question here. And I'm not too sure what you mean by "off-base" or what, really, the disagreement is here. I don't think what I posted was controversial in the slightest. If I may, I get the distinct feeling that you're simply "disagreeing" with me merely for the sake of disagreeing with me. But, to the point: one's metaphysics and philosophical approach (under which morality resides)
cannot fail to change as one makes a transition from atheism to theism or vice versa. For on theism, (at least in most forms of theism; e.g. Christianity, etc) morality is to be understood an objective and binding reality which is ordained and a reflection of God's paradigmatically good nature. In
most forms of atheism (emphasis on most; there are multitudes of approaches to morality on an atheistic worldview though, not surprisingly, I believe they all ultimately fail), morality is nothing more but an subjective human construct with no binding value which varies from cultures and across continents or else is nothing more than a mere tool that natural selection deemed helpful in the advancement of the flourishing of the species
homo sapiens.
But I digress... Look at me, I'm running my mouth off again on morality. Anyway, you've read too much into the term "traditional moral standards," I think. For I only meant to convey a very non-controversial and simple point with that section of text; that a desire to be free of the traditional moral standards established and maintained by a theistic worldview (which go far beyond the mere ritualistic establishments you mention; abstinence from sex before marriage, a singular and faithful marriage, opposition towards abortion, euthanasia, some forms of capital punishment, a marriage grounded in reason and the Natural Law -- you guessed it: between one man and one woman -- etc, etc, etc) is more than capable of leading some to seek to abandon theism and turn to atheism. The main point, again, is that atheism, like religion, can and often does rest on a will to believe rather than on dispassionate rational arguments.