One of the common atheist temptations is to confuse unbelief with clarity, to assume that religion is the irrational part, so removing religion must leave behind a cleaner and more rational human being. But human beings do not work that way, human beings operate through beliefs, emotions... We do not stop wanting ritual, purity, moral tribe, sense of sacredness or transcendent meaning just because we stop using religious language for those desires.
Often, secular life keeps rebuilding religious forms while insisting it has escaped them. I do not mean religion in the theological sense, but in trying to cover some of the needs that religion does. You don't think that there's shared ritual, purity codes, public heresy, sacrificial victims, moral initiation, symbols of belonging, a story that makes ordinary life feel charged with significance? Because there is, and, often, is far more shallow and fulfilling than what you'd get out of the Church.
You can watch that migration happen in ordinary secular settings. Wellness culture fills itself with purification language, little bodily taboos, and rituals of self-cleansing that promise more than health. Astrology survives among people who think they are too sophisticated for religion, but often believe that their life is predestined based on their date of birth. Regardless of religious beliefs, humans have a need for spiritual reassurance, and the sense that the universe has a readable opinion about our life. Materialism and the implication that we're just an evolved bunch of proteins is too dreadful for anyone to.
Even appeals to science often drift into scientism. The question is not whether science is real, the Catholic Church is what gave birth to modern science in the first place. It has always been a great part of us, that of understanding God's creation through the rational minds that God gave us. The question is whether a person is treating it as a discipline of inquiry or as a prestige object that settles status, identity, and moral authority for him, rather than with a genuine intent to discover the truth.
The same structure appears in secular settings just as much: Political movements generate saints, apostates, public confessions, purity tests, and end-times moral drama with depressing regularity. Conspiracy worlds do it from the other side. They offer initiated knowledge, hidden texts, moral struggle, and revelation big enough to swallow ambiguity. The mechanism is the same in both cases. People still want a world divided between the saved and the damned, the initiated and the blind.
That is why atheist self-congratulation often feels so shallow. Saying "I am disenchanted" can become its own enchantment. It flatters the speaker into thinking he no longer has the sort of needs religion addressed. But the appetite remains. And if the appetite remains, it will attach itself somewhere else.
The something else
Atheist are just as needful for the sublime, for the need to worship and to belief there is a spiritual meaning to all we do that, if not covered through religion, they tend to get it through many other ways. from dreadful one such as Stalin's or Kim Jong Un's cults of personality, to fantasy books full of spirits, magic and many gods, through videogames filled with the supernatural they do not feel in their own personal lives, stopping by in Superhero cinematic universes that poorly make up the theology we all need to understand our place in the universe.
Lastly, to close with a quote from one of my favorite Popes:
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.
Pope St. John Paul II's 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio