Since atheism was considered a capital offense by the Greeks, Greek thinkers beginning with Thales of Miletus, who lived circa 585 BCE, carefully avoided any outright rejection of religious belief.
It was known as pastafarians as sort of an analogy to atheism that was something silly and fun, it's a basically a flying bowl of spaghetti with eyes and meatballs.
The Church alone had constantly protested that anarchy was not order, that Satan was not God, that pantheism was worse than atheism, and that Unity could not be proved as a contradiction.
It had stuff about atheism, a lot of stuff about psychology, biases, experiments that showed that depending how you ask the question, you get very different answers from people.
So it's not that the atheism doesn't consist in them thinking stars are actually made up of fire and air, earth and water and aren't celestial beings or something.
He says even though America seems like it's a Protestant country, over time the religion of America is unstable and it's going to tend toward either Catholicism or atheism.
There is Catholicism and atheism, monism and dualism, nihilism and existentialism, and endless more, all very different yet equally as real and true to those who behold them.