A true atheist doesn't have moral fiber as atheism doesn't provide any sort of moral guidelines to adhere to. A true atheist will never do anything unless it benefits them somehow or it feels good. The technical term for that is hedonism. Try and deny it all you want, Brian was praying and the context of the situation makes that so clear that anyone who actually watched the episode would have to be either blind and deaf or just plain dense to not understand what happened. If doing the right thing involves sacrifice that has no personal benefit, an atheist will take the easy way out every single time but this time Brian didn't. There is no way around this except to correct the gross inaccuracy of this article concerning Brian's religious beliefs or at least acknowledge that there is evidence to suggest otherwise which there clearly is.