Strength of belief is essential here.
The atheists you describe are not truly atheists, they are agnostics. They don’t know if God exists and they don’t care. If you don’t see this now, you will see it if you engage them, or have a Christian apologist engage them, in a friendly but serious debate about the existence of God. The vast majority of self professed “atheists” also don’t know what atheism truly is, and will admit they are agnostics after being subject to a real debate.
Atheists feel very strongly about their belief system, and will drive their arguments to the end of the earth. This belief system is a religion in that it purports to answer questions of cosmology, and it outweighs all other beliefs in magnitude of intensity.
Now for the link found in neurophysiology and neuroanatomy. Atheist Sam Harris found in a study a few years back, using functional MRIs, that the part of the atheist brain activated during contemplation of their belief is the same part activated in the Christian brain when Christians contemplate theirs. Contemplation of beliefs included reading respective statements, by atheists and Christians respectively, such as, “The God of the Bible is not real” and “The God of the Bible is real.” The verbiage of these quotes might be off by a word or two, I’m going by memory here.
And, we and our brains appear to be CREATED such that we REQUIRE something/SomeOne to BELIEVE IN, WORSHIP.
An atheist more or less worships their disbelief and the rebellion it supports.
Then they ride the coattails of disenfranchised Judeo/Christian values as a viable substitute for morality (claiming it as their logical own) when, in fact, their cosmology has absolutely NO supportive rational for any morality whatsoever.
That’s a very good explanation of your point. Thanks for taking the time to write it all up. I do see your point now.