When someone really, really, really needs to have a belief system to survive,

and their entire paradigm is found teetering on facts, there's no doubt that denial, strawmen, dismissal, and blame will be their only salvation.

You can't expect a scientific approach to reason to come from a person who can't stop drinking the booze. The addiction isn't like physical addiction, it's their entire being/self/ego that's at stake. Until they can begin to break the habit or addiction to the sum of their fears and see that there is life (and death) after truth, they can't budge and must find a way out.

I see it another way... If we were once steeped in religion, and we were able to come to the realization of our mortality and still find freedom from fear's lie, we atheists were very lucky.