I appreciate your observations. I would agree that spiritual deadness is likely associated with the existential emptiness you identify, and leaves the unbeliever vulnerable.
I don't know that all these people are atheists, they might be, but the way I would approach it is to allow that people can reach this endpoint by diverse routes.
Once there, the common element is being totally closed to any message which is discrepant from an exceedingly narrow and intensely held attitude. Questions of true and false, accurate and distorted, pale to insignificance.
For these dead-end true believers, the sacrifice of truth is a small price to pay for the sake of the cause.
Their ego is so deeply involved in their view of the world, that any input which raises a challenge to it is taken as a personal assault. Hence the hostility and rage.
Once there, the common element is being totally closed to any message which is discrepant from an exceedingly narrow and intensely held attitude. Questions of true and false, accurate and distorted, pale to insignificance.
For these dead-end true believers, the sacrifice of truth is a small price to pay for the sake of the cause.
Their ego is so deeply involved in their view of the world, that any input which raises a challenge to it is taken as a personal assault. Hence the hostility and rage.
I don't think we disagree on the symptoms, but we might disagree on the cause of the symptoms.
Indeed, I'd submit to you that "The Cause" is the cause, i.e. their so-called "political" cause is precisely what causes the symptoms we observe in them [symptoms that we call "true-believer-ism," or "ego-ism," or "hostility," or "rage"].
But as I've tried to hit on in some of my other posts, I don't think that, at heart, this really is a "political" cause for these people: Rather, it's a religion for them, and, after a while, if you want to be intellectually honest about it, you have to start asking yourself just who their deity is, and then have the strength not to look away from the answer that's staring back at you.