I'd always suspected that atheism was satanism
-LITE and right there copped it in the eye: a shameless plug.
Atheists reject the message of Salvation, even that Jesus existed at all in some cases. Spiritually, by their own will, they inhabit an antediluvian landscape where God is unable to gaze upon His own tortured, bleeding, dying Son, crying out with anguish in their stead.
So God just sees them. What was it like in those days, with no Redemption available, with sin embraced utterly, with or without litter collected?
Genesis 6:5 And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
God destroyed that generation for a reason but understood that even after millennia, the sacrifice at Golgotha, more millennia with dark ages and re-discoveries and re-kindled dark ages and post-structuralist textual criticism
BINGO! .it would all result in evil abroad once more.
Luke 17:26-30 As it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noe entered into the ark, and the flood came, and destroyed them all. Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.