Was he really an atheist?

My response to http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism ( I don't feel like registering and since it is all written...)

My road to atheism has been very slow, painful, hard and very spiritual. I am quite upset to be called materialist because I am an atheist. I do experience like any believers the wonders of my imagination and my intuition. Mr Nelson never was an atheist. An atheist don't reject religion or faith in a midlife crisis. Being an atheist is not about a feeling nor a sudden conviction - that is the realm of faith. No. An atheist sincerely confront his feelings and his though and his leaps of faith, all of them, including the one of non believing.

The hardest is to be an atheist while remaining spiritual. Too many atheists - the less convinced actually - tend to display an exaggerated incline to science and reason. But nature gave us intuition and imagination as tools to experience the world. We should not deny ourselves these because we realize that God is a myth.

I see no contradiction into practicing spiritual rituals - I was born catholic and I am the only person that do lent in my family - and being atheist. I just do it for the feeling they bring, the sense of connection to myself and a community of people following the same ritual. I even feel "god" not as a natural entity but as a feeling that comes from my irrational self. Yet, I don't need any false construction and deformation of truth to be spiritual. I don't need any celestial dictatorship, as Hitchen says, to rule my life.