You mean it was a waste of time for me, right?

The fallacy in your analogy with golf is that those who don’t play golf aren’t obliged to take up some other hobby. By contrast, those who deny there’s any God are practically committed to replacing theism with some alternative ultimate explanation of everything. Otherwise, they’d be radical skeptics or agnostics rather than flat-out atheists. As I said, that ultimate explanation that atheists tend to prefer is science plus philosophical naturalism, and that’s the broader sense of “atheism” that the second part of my article takes up.