Back then people probably didn't even all have the same sorts of stories about their myths straight. And while we think today we are so enlightened having little faith in these things, we are more in line with these people than we might admit, the common thread being herd mentality. Consider yourself, are you an atheist because you sat down one day and came up with your own philosophy about it? Or are you an atheist because there are millions of westerners today who are also atheists and its an existing off the shelf philosophy that is easy to adopt, and you happened to fall into it? Maybe you did work it out yourself, but for many people their sensibilities and beliefs tend to fall into discrete categories already present to a good degree in a society, versus being truly novel concepts unique to them.
"Atheist" feels like such a strange and artificial category, lumping people together on the basis of what they don't believe rather than what they do.
It's a bit like defining everyone who isn't Indo-European or Asiatic as "black", even though there's more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world put together.
> "Atheist" feels like such a strange and artificial category
Bah, not any more that any other category: I have religious friends who are in theory from the same religion: some believe in heaven some don't, some believe in the miracles some don't, etc..
But yes, there can be atheists who believe that the earth is flat or that crystals can heal, etc.
But they all identify with the same hierarchical structure to some degree, at least if we're talking about a group like Roman Catholics, Sunni Muslims etc. It gets more complicated of course where e.g. Judaism is concerned, because that's more than just a religion.
