Historically atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred per se but has nearly always rejected a particular conception of the divine... Atheism is parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical western atheism was developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the United States during the modern period. The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused exclusively on the God developed by fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religions. This has weakened their critique, because fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition it is trying to defend.from "The Case for God" page 7.
As I was re-reading this paragraph I was reminded of a friend of my daughter who during her school days had been a devout Roman Catholic. When I met her a few years later she said that she was now happily an atheist. I looked her in the eye and said, "But I bet you are a Catholic atheist!" She agreed and knew exactly what I meant!
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