Just consider the phenomenon of celebrity atheists and the question has been answered. This phenomenon has, at least, three aspects:
1) Spiritual warfare coupled with a dose of rebellion loves company.
2) Secular mis-education or, re-education.
3) Our propensity towards glorifying those whom we admire.
1) Spiritual warfare coupled with a dose of rebellion loves company.
One reason that atheists are so active on college campus is that, in essence, they act like a styled version of temple prostitutes. Temple prostitutes, who are alive and well within certain witchcraft / magik groups, entice unbelievers by sexual enticements, their worship systems include sexual practices. The youth are naturally rebellious, saturated with raging hormones, have just been freed of mommy’s apron strings and thrown into co-ed circumstances.
Along come the atheist and encourage the confusion between rebelling against religion with rebelling against God. They then deny any such thing as traditional ethics / morals and the rest is pop-cultural history (enter STDs, single teen moms, emotional damage from being treated as a sexual object de jour, children living out of a suitcase as they are shuffled between feuding un-married parents, etc., etc., etc.).
Why do you think that atheist make besmirching Christian values a large portion of their atheistic worldviews (even whilst borrowing from Christian values in a plagiaristic manner)? Keep in mind that two of atheism’s consoling delusions are absolute autonomy and that which follows from it, lack of ultimate accountability.
2) Secular mis-education or, re-education.
It is claimed that atheists, by any other name, are more educated than their religionist counterparts. Beyond asking just what “educated” may mean, this is not surprising (if it is true). By the time that they graduate college they have been indoctrinated via the atheist catechism. Each and every subject they study is not only taught with specific lack of references to God but they are taught (at least in the USA) within an environment wherein God is censored, it is illegal to reference God.
Thus, for example, atheist rally behind Richard Dawkins when he claims that theism is a science stopper. They ubiquitously promulgate this well-within-the-box-atheist-group think-talking point-de jour throughout the World Wide Web. They accept and regurgitate this, even though it is utterly inaccurate, because their cult hero thus saith. They also do this because within their tax payer funded schools, they are not taught that the very premise upon which science is based in the first place is that the universe and life were created by a rational God and that thus, God’s creation could be rationally discerned.
For more info on this see:
Question for atheists: is “God did it” a science stopper?
Is atheism to be correlated with science? And, on “Material Creationism”
Paul Davies on cosmology: modern science vs. the Bible
Atheism and Science – Is There a Relation?, part 1
Consider that William Provine, stated, “Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented,” that PZ Myers claims that atheism and science as “inseparable” and on it goes.
Atheistic arguments and worldviews are actually and specifically inserted into what are supposed to be science textbooks—see Protecting the Science Classroom. This mirrors that which was noted by an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (Can Med Assoc J., 1961 May 27; 84(21): 1205–1206):
Dr. Wulf Grobin…has lately drawn to our attention a particularly intriguing article published in a recent issue of Socetskoe Zdravookhranenie, a Soviet journal of public health, under the rather startling title, “Scientific Atheistic Propaganda in Medical Schools”.
Two years ago, according to T. Ya. Tkachev, the author of this report (Sovet. Zdravookhr., 1: 46, 1961), the Ministry of Higher Education of the U .S.S.R. recommended that a course on the basis of scientific atheism be instituted in Soviet medical schools. It was proposed that this course should consist of a total of 24 hours instruction covering the following subjects: Marxist Atheism as the Highest Form of Atheism…The Form and Methods of Scientific-Atheistic Education…the Soviet intelligentsia is exhorted to work toward the “atheistic education” of the laboring masses, as one of its “highest duties”. The author describes at length the methods employed in his medical school to indoctrinate students with the concepts of atheism. Every medical discipline from anatomy to psychiatry…
3) Our propensity towards glorifying those whom we admire.
Consider that when there is no higher being there are only higher humans. Why do you think that in, for example, atheist Communist regimes the regime is all: the regime giveth and the regime taketh away? When there are no unalienable rights endowed upon us by “nature’s God” our “Creator” (as per the Declaration of Independence) all you have is a group of powerful humans.
For more on the issue of our propensity towards glorifying those whom we admire and how some consider this as an evolutionary bi-product, please see the attached video of Roger Scruton turning the tables on Richard Dawkins and the other celebrity New Atheists by extension.