A bunch of blind men approach the same elephant and they each touch a different part of the elephant's anatomy. They reach different conclusions about what type of beast an elephant is. One will grab the tail is very much like a snake, and someone will touch the trunk and decide that the elephant is like a rope, and someone will touch it's side and say that the elephant is like a wall, and somebody runs into the touch and decides that the elephant is like a spear. I do the same thing with the body of God. When the believers encounter it they are scandalized and depressed and terrified.
Some atheists get wind of the tragedy and they filter it through their viewpoint.
If you think about it, the death of God is every bit as upsetting to atheists as it would be for believers because it invalidates their viewpoint as well. If God once did exist then atheism is not a sensible interpretation of reality either. Everybody interprets the corpse through their own ideology and it's like a Rorschach test. It was fun, as often happens with sea sagas, to have lots of different people on the ship with very diverse backgrounds and competing arguments about how the universe works. That's a good question.