**TL;DR – Atheists tend to have antagonistic beliefs that contradict their reasoning for being an atheist.** No matter what, all views on religion, spirituality, and God should be recognized and approached willingly and diligently. I’ve noticed atheists to be the ones who are most likely to shut out any views on religion just for the sake of doing so, therefore shutting themselves out. To make sure this isn’t entirely personal, I’ll be referencing the source below closely. Writer Matthew Prince acknowledges two broad reasons for atheists being atheists: personal reasons – those applicable to experiences and the greater world alike – and evidence-based reasons that rely on the lack of evidence. Personal reasons are somewhat negotiable as they are, indeed, personal. This could be because of a horrible experience where the individual couldn’t or didn’t want to find hope in religion. There is also the mindset that the world will always have evil in it regardless, so how could there be a god? Even with this ‘doomer’ mindset, if you will, it still makes sense to acknowledge faith. Those with a ‘doomer’ mindset are still putting their faith into something, yet atheists tend to abide by a lack of faith. It’s easy for humans to be biased for the lack of something attributing to the absence of something. If someone is an atheist for evidence-based reasons, the same reasoning is still applicable – “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” Why don’t atheists lean more towards agnosticism and acknowledge the unknown? Even if some atheists still do this, they would even align greatly with religious individuals who also acknowledge the existence of god with faith in the unknown. Yet, their beliefs seem to remain antagonistic to religion, spirituality, and God. https://medium.com/the-apeiron-blog/why-nobody-should-be-an-atheist-1df06461d504

I don't know that atheists are different from other religious groups in this respect. Other religious groups "shut themselves out" from religions that are not their own, just as atheists shut themselves out from the beliefs that they do not agree with. If atheism (as opposed to agnosticism for these purposes) is saying "there is not a God", and Christianity, for example, is saying "There is the Christian holy trinity and nothing else", these both seem equally closed-minded. I think this perception of atheism is largely due to atheism not being considered a legitimate "belief system" (for the sake of not getting into the minutiae of how it's a lack of belief). Just as it is assumed that religious people made the decision to believe their respective religion after thorough research and thought, atheism is not a mindless, angst-driven decision, as many believe it to be. So if they are indeed shutting themselves out from beliefs that are not their own, and assuming it's after careful consideration, I don't think it's fair to say that it's any more "unnecessary" than religious people doing the same thing. The comedian (and atheist) Ricky Gervais once said on Stephen Colbert's show (paraphrased) that as there are roughly 3000 possible gods to believe in, Christians and other religions deny 2999 of those gods, atheists just deny one more.