On Importance

In the continuous attempt to run our lives in an efficient and satisfactory way, we make an ongoing evaluation of what is important in our lives and what is not, and thus the order of importance in which we arrange the various 'concepts' that form our lives greatly determines how our lives are shaped.
Something is important by measure of the difference it makes: if a certain thing makes no difference in our life (e.g. what color of socks I wear today) or just a small difference (e.g. what we eat tonight) then we consider it not to be important. For something to be important it must make a consequential difference, meaning that this important thing changes another aspect of our life, for example submission to a religious system. To determine what is important we must assess what makes a difference big enough to care for, ie if this importance is beneficial to us. We must also have criteria to make this assessment: why is one thing more important to us than another thing? Something is important because we care for it, and what we care for is subject to an ongoing evaluation. During a persons lifetime the criteria naturally change. This continuous process has a large influence on how we run our lives.

For almost everyone there will be sooner or later a thought about the design of our lives which concerns the importance of our (dis-)belief in the existence of one or more god-like creatures, and consequently the importance of following the rules that his ground-personnel imposes upon us. Those who believe in the God they have been conditioned to believe in, by family and society etc, tend to attribute great importance not only to this belief but also to the rules that come with it. For these people, their belief in God and submission to the religious system is often one of the most important, if not the most important, thing in life. There are of course numerous believers who don't attribute a lot of importance to their belief, and whose belief hardly has any influence or importance in their daily life. What you see in society today is an increasing amount of people who have faith, but kind of 'pick-and-mix' from the principles handed down to them by religion, varying from alcohol-drinking Muslims to believers who don't see the inside of a church in most years of their lives.
But this goes to show that the more important something is to us, the more difference it will make in life, and by virtue of the difference it makes, becomes more important. The reverse order of this process is also often seen, for example when people are loosing their faith and/or religion.

Those who lost their belief or never had it, generally don't attribute much importance to it. There are only few people, for example Christopher Hitchens or professor Dawkins, who seem to attribute a high importance to their Atheism. One reason is of course that there there are many more people who believe in some kind of God than there are atheists, and the other is that not believing in some thing or some concept usually also implies not to attribute much importance to it. Not believing in a God means that the possible existence of the same makes no difference in managing and designing our lives. The atheist doesn't add the burden of a religion to his life and thus not only lives without the burden of religious rules altogether, he is also free from the dilemma of how much importance to attribute to religion and to what degree he should follow it's rules: The Atheist only has to follow his conscience and the rules (written and unwritten) of his society.

A popular prejudice among believers about Atheists is that by not attributing importance to the value of a religion, the Atheists don't attribute importance to anything at all. This implies that Atheists wouldn't care at all, which is simply not true. Moreover, a lot of values and ideas of religious people are shared by Atheists, who in their turn share these values for their intrinsic value rather than for religious reason. An Atheist who does a charitable deed because he wants to contribute to society surely has higher standards than a religious person who does the same charitable deed in order to go to heaven after death? This is of course a polarising example, but the bottom line is that an atheist who does not rely on the traditional religious framework has more thinking to do in order to run his life in an efficient and satisfactory way.
To lead a life without attributing importance to anything more than for example what food comes to the table or who wins the football cup can be done easily with or without a religious framework. But if one wants to lead a life attributing importance to more than just the common banalities, one has a harder time doing this as an Atheist than as a religious person.