There is a whole internet community of self proclaimed atheists, primarily of the ex-christian and ex-muslim varieties displaying fanatical fervor of the same nature as that of the faith based homes they have abandoned.

The main issue with the "atheist identity" as a primary identity is a simple one- that the atheist category is merely negationary, to deny the existence of a personal deity. Atheism by itself provides no ethics, metaphysics, social/cultural attitudes to operate in the world, epistemology to derive truth from the world and so on. Therefore, atheism that is devoid of any overlying philosophical framework is analogous to throwing someone into the ocean without a raft or even a wooden log to latch onto in the tempest of life.

This is why atheists and apostates of traditional religions tend to ground themselves in certain modern political ideologies which act as a substitute for religion- communism, progressive liberalism or even fascism. (For those make the simplistic dichotomy that right wing is religious and left wing is atheistic, they must not forget that most white supremacists and Nazis tend to be dismissive of christianity).

As a a teenager newly having discovered atheism, even I was swiftly drawn into woke-progressive ideologies and socialism. Having briefly lost interest in the religion of my ancestors, I was drawn towards a new sort of religion. One that provided (albeit with faulty reasoning) a set of ethics, values and community. It later took me years to discover how flawed these systems were, after doing due reading and discovering the mechanics of free market capitalism, the virtues of social conservatism and the writings of Hindutva (namely Savarkar's book- Essentials of Hindutva, among others)

I now call myself a Hindu first, and only after subsequent questioning does someone find out that my theological inclinations are atheistic. The reasons are simple, if my identity lies at the intersection of Hinduism and atheism, my primary identity is that which forms the bulk of my personality and drives the majority of my principles. Atheism is just my negation of a personal God, but Hinduism and Hindutva drive my stance on social attitudes, political issues, cultural interests and even basic philosophical ideas such as Ahimsa and Adhikara Bhedha. Similarly my thoughts and reasoning about basic ideals pertaining to the human condition are drawn from the characters in the Ramayana and Mahabharata and not from God Delusion by Richard Dawkins or the Moral Landscape by Sam Harris.

It would therefore be intellectually dishonest to call myself an atheist first and a Hindu second, when the latter has been more integral to my life and the very building blocks of my character in comparison to the former which is not more than a specific philosophical stance on a very specific philosophical question.