The atheist in the end fails because he is, metaphorically, trapped in his head. The atheist is imprisoned by an intellectual certitude that there is no possibility beyond the mundane spheres of his limited awareness, too arrogant to admit his awareness is limited in the first place, too afraid to accept that his perceptual limitations can be transcended and experimented with, and too lazy to muster the real will to honestly and sincerely address, on a level of deep conscience, the reality of what it is to be connected and engaged with the living presence of his very being.
The atheist fails because atheism is not a system of knowledge or a way of living, or a way of life that truly welcomes the apparent uncertainties of existence - but rather it is just 'not' something - 'not' institutionally religious, in the same way that someone can be 'not capitalist'. It is simple for someone to claim they are anti-capitalist or anti-fascist - but it is much harder and takes much more guts to actually stand for something. In the case of politics it would mean then to use practical intelligence to formulate ideas about new forms of governance and production. In the same sense, a response to being atheist would not be merely to mull about and repeat the same tired and smug atheist slogans - but would mean to actually face the ontological uncertainty of life with the balls to explore the possibilities of perception.
If one does this with great commitment (and all great mystical traditions suggest this), one eventually discovers the emptiness of life - but not the dry intellectual 'emptiness' that atheists talk about like babies screaming for the bottle - but an emptiness which is itself living, growing, and intimately connected to every fibre of one's being.
This experience is, funnily enough, originally where the 'concept of God' came from. Ancient texts were allegories and stories which were intended to evoke the feeling of this sort of mystical experience - but were, in time, bastardized and dogmatized by fearful and repressed human societies until the religious institutions that we know today were formed.
Atheists are always winging and screaming about the 'concept of God' as if they understand what the 'concept of God' is and think they are more intelligent than people in churches because of their supreme understanding of relativity. They ultimately fail because, for the most part, they are the only one's playing around with concepts - God is not a concept at all (mostly) to truly spiritual people, but a feeling and a living reality that is not validated by theological logic but by the grace of the heart and the light of an empty mind. An atheist cannot conceive of how it could be possible to truly live without constructs and live open to the life-process of the world, just as a repressed follower of religion who has never truly questioned the constructs of his church cannot. In the end they both fail, whilst the things carry on in the world of the living.
And in the end it's one of those things. Religious tradition is mostly held up by outdated notions of the spiritual, and people have every right to want to be 'anti-religious' - but to walk around as an atheist, feeling smug that you are comfortable with being worm-food, and deluding yourself into believing you are sincerely open to the strata of perception possible for one with a open mind and heart, is truly infantile and ultimately pathetic.