There are as many atheisms as there are gods

[rug]

Atheism has stalked religion for as long as the latter has existed – and today’s variant only really got started in the 18th century



The American Atheists organisation with a Christmas billboard in New York.The American Atheists organisation with a Christmas billboard in New York. Photograph: Richard Levine/Demotix/Corbis

Posted by Andrew Brown
Sunday 27 July 2014 07.04 EDT

There are as many atheisms as there are gods. We spend most of our lives disbelieving in things without wasting time asking why, and quite right too. So what is it that makes some particular forms of disbelief intellectually fertile or socially significant? Nick Spencer’s short history of atheism goes a long way towards answering this question, and anyone seriously interested in religion and irreligion today should read it.

The first shock of the book is just how old the strongest atheist arguments are. Spencer doesn’t quote my favourite, a Babylonian tablet from around 1,000 BC that was referenced in Robert Bellah’s book, but the Book of Job is certainly a powerful argument against what you might call the corporate PR department of GodCo.

Over in Greece, the logical difficulties of an omnipotent and benevolent God were clear as soon as people got the concepts of omnipotence and benevolence straight. Everything you needed to be an intellectually fulfilled disbeliever in the Christian God was in place by the birth of Christ.

In this light, it’s remarkable not that there are atheists today, but that there were so few in the long centuries of Christendom’s glory. I don’t think persecution or the fear of persecution can account for this. It did not manage to suppress all manners of subtle heresy; why should it successfully suppress the most obvious and radical objection to the whole business?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2014/jul/27/atheism-gods-religion

[safeinOhio]

1. Labels limit what you want to say.

I like the term "Free Thinkers".

[mr blur]

2. Just the usual Guardian facile drivel from Andrew Brown

[rug]

4. Oh, you don't like The Guardian?

Here's another review of that book from The Guardian.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/30/atheists-origin-species-nick-spencer-review

[AtheistCrusader]

3. Historically ignorant and also abusive of the simple term 'atheist'.

A-theist. Without theism.

There is really only one negative state in all cases.

"I don’t think persecution or the fear of persecution can account for this."

Ask Giordano Bruno.

[rug]

5. You missed his point.

One answer, Spencer suggests, is that important atheism is always secondary to theism. For any particular atheism to matter, there must be an important conception of God to be rejected; in that sense, atheism is closely related to blasphemy. And the concept of God is itself extremely flexible: some are so strange as to be unrecognisable as gods to other worshippers, which is one reason why the early Christians themselves appeared as atheists to the pagans around them.

Arguments against God’s justice, such as those we see in Babylon, are not arguments against his existence: they are arguments about his character, which presuppose that he has one. Modern atheism, in the sense of a rejection of Christian monotheistic conceptions of God, doesn’t really get started until the 18th century. But by the French Revolution, modern western arguments were clear except for the faith in science, which emerged in the next 100 years.

Your example of Bruno makes his point: he was executed for heresy not atheism.

[AtheistCrusader]

6. But the atheism is always the same.

Lack of belief.

That it might be viewed differently by the people with the ropes, stakes, piles of wood, and torches, in each individual case, is not interesting. It doesn't change the nature of a failure to believe, how the believer views that person. Whether it be a non-believer in Islam, or Christianity, or whatever.

The atheists are all the same; non-belief. Where the atheists might diverge, is in the mode of response to such things, whether just 'meh' or grabbing the nearest soapbox and railing about it in the public square.

I would disagree with his interpretation of non-belief in Babylon, insofar as, they wouldn't be talking about the same god. If they accepted god in one form, then rejected one aspect of his character in one hypothetical form. I would not identify that as an atheist.

[rug]

7. If atheism is simply nonbelief, then it varies by the belief.

atheism is always secondary to theism. For any particular atheism to matter, there must be an important conception of God to be rejected

[AtheistCrusader]

8. Is a person who doesn't follow sports a different kind of a-sportsjunkie for each and every sport?

It's not 'secondary', it's the antonym. Without. Lack of.

[rug]

9. A poor analogy.

"A" is simply a prefix. The root of the word is theism.

[AtheistCrusader]

10. Meaning 'without'.

Unless and until a person ascribes to some faith, they are, literally atheists.

The moment that individual starts holding ANY religion to be true or allegiance to it or observing it, etc, then they are a theist. (Not going to complicate matters with Buddhism at the moment)

[rug]

11. Correct. And the entire word means: "without theism".

You have the sequence of events backwards. One cannot claim to be "without'' something until that something is identified.

[AtheistCrusader]

12. Cannot claim to be no, but still without.

As I am without interest in any number of sports teams I have never heard of. You could narrow it down by offering hypotheticals but the answer will remain; nyet.

[rug]

13. Had you been alive in the tenth century I suppose you'd call yourself an agravitist.

[AtheistCrusader]

14. As in shallow?

[rug]

15. As in being without belief in gravity as it had not yet been articulated.

[AtheistCrusader]

16. Sure, if I lived then, I'd have thought the earth sucked.

[rug]

17. Hence, belief precedes nonbelief.

[AtheistCrusader]

18. That was a joke.

Not having a concept for it, I'd probably have had no working opinion on the issue.