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Nietzsche is to atheism as John the Baptist is to Christianity. Nietzsche was a prophet who saw deeper than your basic village atheist. "God is dead," said Nietzsche, "and here are the implications." One of which is that a person cannot deconvert from Christianity to atheism and bring Christian morality, or any morality for that matter, with them.
This is what Nietzsche the prophet revolts against, and despises; viz., the shallow sophomorisms of people who claim atheism and moralistically mock Christians as evil and hypocritical.
Such behavior is ironical, since all along it is the Facebook atheists who are the hypocritical fools, in what for Nietzsche was the great atheistic apostasy.
Terry Eagelton got this right. Here is an extended quote, with some parenthetical comments along the way. Go slow now. Pay attention, all ye atheists.
"Nietzsche speaks scornfully of French freethinkers from Voltaire to Comte as trying to ‘out-Christian’ Christianity with a craven cult of altruism and philanthropy, virtues which are as distasteful to him as pity, compassion, benevolence and suchlike humanitarian claptrap. [Think now of Facebook atheists.]
He can find nothing in such values but weakness cunningly tricked out as power. These, too, are ways of disavowing God's disappearance. [The Facebook atheist is truly an unbeliever, but in their professed atheistic faith.]
God is indeed dead, and it is we who are his assassins, yet our true crime is less deicide than hypocrisy. [Because humanitarian claptrap is hypocritical atheism.]
Having murdered the Creator in the most spectacular of all Oedipal revolts, we have hidden the body, repressed all memory of the traumatic event, tidied up the scene of the crime and, like Norman Bates in Psycho, behave as though we are innocent of the act. We have also dissembled our deicide with various shamefaced forms of pseudo-religion, as though in expiation of our unconscious guilt. Modern secular societies, in other words, have effectively disposed of God but find it morally and politically convenient – even imperative – to behave as though they have not. They do not actually believe in him, but it is still necessary for them to imagine that they do. [Today's atheists cannot, in word and deed, extricate themselves from the metaphysical foundation laid by Christian theism.]
God is too vital a piece of ideology to be written off, even if it is one that their own profane activities render less and less plausible. There is a performative contradiction between what such civilisations do and what they proclaim that they do. To look at the beliefs embodied in their behaviour, rather than at what they piously profess, is to recognise that they have no faith in God at all, but it is as though the fact has not yet been brought to their attention. One of Nietzsche's self-appointed tasks is to do precisely that. [Nietzsche exposes the deeds of the so-called atheists, which speak louder than their confessions.]"
- Eagleton, Terry. Culture and the Death of God, pp. 157-158
