I appreciate this sensitivity, and see where it comes from and why its justified, but I also find it interesting that interrogating personal states is perceived as invasive, even as this is the topic at hand.

Actually, I practically never see it as invasive; I'm just aware that other people sometimes do, and try to act accordingly. I think this is a common mindset, actually: It's easier to put up a disclaimer that will be ignored 90-99% of the time than it is to deal with someone who's offended 1-10% of the time, and generally not worth the effort of trying to guess whether any given person will be offended by any given question.

I think feeling like I have inconsistent pieces (i.e., like I'm going insane) would be a common response to the anticipation of a non-FOOM world.

I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion - the other sentences in that paragraph didn't make much sense to me. (For one thing, one of us doesn't understand what 'FOOM' means. I'm not certain it's you, though.) I think I know what you're describing, though, and it doesn't appear to be a common response to becoming an atheist or embracing rationality (I'd appreciate if others could chime in on this). It also doesn't necessarily mean you're going insane - my normal brain-function tends in that direction, and I've never seen any disadvantage to it. (This old log of mine might be useful, on the topic of insanity in general. Context available on request; I'm not at the machine that has that day's logs in it at the moment. Also, disregard the username, it's ooooold.)

But recalling, it felt like this: it would be "horrible" for the child to die on the tracks. However, what is "horrible" about horrible? There's nothing actually horrible about it. Without some terminal value behind the value (for example, I don't think I ever thought a child dieing on the tracks was objectively horrible, but that it might be objectively horrible for me not to feel like horrible was horrible at some level of recursion) it seems that the value buck doesn't get passed, it doesn't stop, it just disappears.

My Buddhist friends would agree with that. Actually, I pretty much agree with it myself (and I'm not depressed, and I don't think it's horrible that I don't see death as horrible, at any level of recursion). What most people seem to forget, though, is that the absence of a reason to do something isn't the same as the presence of a reason not to do that thing. People who've accepted that there's no objective value in things still experience emotions, and impulses to do various things including acting compassionately, and generally have no reason not to act on such things. We also experience the same positive feedback from most actions that theists do - note how often 'fuzzies' are explicitly talked about here, for example. It does all add back up to normality, basically.