Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong? — VoidDetector
I feel like 'atheism' is the wrong word to use considering our inclinations to believe in supernatural (beyond the norm and unlike the norm) phenomena is and has been an intrinsic part of our thoughts and emotions because part of seeking to learn what we don't know is expecting to find that which we don't know. Perhaps 'supernaturalism' is a better fit. — BrianW
In my view, atheism is mainly the rejection of superstition. — VagabondSpectre
Your talking about the different variations of atheism. — hachit
Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong? — VoidDetector
Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong? — VoidDetector
I assume the book contains some evidence or justification? :chin: For now, this is nothing more than the usual emotional and irrational attack that atheists make on religion. <yawn>The belief that there were no gods was common in the ancient world, research by Prof. Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge, concludes.
But “ancient atheism” was effectively written out of history when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire after the reign of Constantine in the early fourth century, heralding a new era of state-imposed belief, says Whitmarsh in a new book, Battling the Gods, which collates evidence of atheism in the Greek city states.
The study breaks the widely assumed link between atheism and progress or modernity but also rejects the idea that faith is a natural, instinctive impulse.
Not only is Atheism older than theism, it is far more ubiquitous in the animal kingdom. — Josh Alfred
Nor for you, it seems! :smile: :smile: :smile:To just simply admit, "I don't know" was not enough for the myth makers in our civilization. — Josh Alfred
Somehow I feel I have been deprived of the epiphany I expected, reading the title. — Pair o'Ducks
The author's thesis is stronger than that: he argues that atheism was a "thing" in the ancient world, not just a few individual exemplars. — SophistiCat
... Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless" ...
Before we believed in Gods - if there was such a time? - we would not have thought of Gods, so we would have the "absence of thinking of" Gods that you surmise. — Pattern-chaser
and most of what one can say about the ancient world is going to rest on slender supports. — Bitter Crank
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