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I'm just going to say that I do not believe you are a "former leftist and atheist who's cringing at other atheists." This looks like the umpteenth iteration of a particular persona who keeps returning here.
The rejoinder you are complaining about is indeed a certain kind of smug gotcha line that's kind of cringe, but it's a rejoinder to an equally smug and cringeworthy argument. When theists try to play gotcha like that, they invite gotchas in return. This is why atheists who've gotten over their "arguing with evangelicals" phase usually aren't interested in that kind of debate. I'm fine actually talking about why I do or do not believe in God. But the sort of Christian who uses the "How can you be moral without God?" argument (usually followed by some variant of "You don't actually believe there is no God, you're just pretending") isn't interested in genuine discussion, but in seeing who can win the gotcha contest.
I think your Lizzo/Muslim analogy is kind of ridiculous. I don't personally care whether or not Ayan Hirsi Ali really believes in Christianity, but I can see why actual believers would care if someone is just wearing Christianity as a skin suit. You are overthinking the attraction to Islam; it's been pointed out here plenty of times that the left's infatuation with Islam isn't because of any intrinsic qualities of Islam (if it were practiced mostly by white people, they'd be condemning it as a Bronze age death cult). It's purely and solely because Islam is mostly practiced by brown third-worlders.
Well, I am interested in what basis do atheists build their moral foundations, if any. Generally it turns out to be some form of utilitarianism, if they have one, and I go "Oh, okay" because I'm not that convinced by utilitarianism. The ones that don't have any really considered basis just seem to tend to assume that it's in the water or the air that we'll be nice to each other, or concerned about the marginalised, or whatever, and they very vehemently deny that they are living off the remainder of the cultural Christian capital that formed such sentiments originally.
I'm a religious agnostic who thinks that utilitarianism doesn't make sense as a moral principle.
I give credit to Christianity for having helped to form modern morality, including my own, I just don't think that belief in Christianity is necessary for that morality to continue.
I don't have any basis for my morality other than that I am accustomed to it since childhood, I sometimes feel guilt when I hurt others, and I have had a few mystic experiences, drug-fueled and otherwise, in which I felt that other sentient beings were the same thing as me, just looking at the universe from a different angle.
But I don't think that Christians actually have a good basis for their morality either. "God said that we should do it this way" does not actually get rid of the question of what to found morality on, since for me the natural reply even if I believed that God existed would be "Why should I care what God wants? Why is God's morality more important than any other?".
If an omnipotent, omniscient being thinks that A is good and B is bad, it would be an act of insane hubris to imagine that you could know better than him. The more so when this being has the power to sentence you to eternal suffering or bliss.
Would you still feel this way if you discovered that God said raping and murdering strangers for fun is always good?
There are already people who do that for a given definition of "stranger"
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