Atheism liberated me from pointless thinking,and made my life enjoyable.

[Mudhammam]

It is not closely tied, it IS emotion itself. It is a woo word and gap answer from ignorance. It is our natural evolutionary "sense of awe". I have that too. I get it when I think of my mom, or my cat or the awesome power of nature.

"Spirituality" is a bullshit word rooted in mythology and superstition. I have absolutely no value for that word.

After reading Sam Harris' Waking Up, I would have to disagree that spiritually is simply a sense of awe, though it's definitely a sense. I think spiritually involves losing the illusion of self (the freedom from which is the basis of ALL spirituality and religion) and experiencing consciousness alone; it perhaps to some degree rings true of consciousness what Aristotle declared of mind when he wrote, "In a certain sense the mind is all that exists."