Welcome to Tuesday Trivia!
If you are:
this thread is for you ALL!
Come share the cool stuff you love about the past!
We do not allow posts based on personal or relatives' anecdotes. Brief and short answers are allowed but MUST be properly sourced to respectable literature. All other rules also apply—no bigotry, current events, and so forth.
For this round, let’s look at: Atheism! As the joke goes, an agnostic is an atheist who is afraid of commitment. This week, we're celebrating those who went the full distance and concluded there is no god(s) and this spin around the big blue marble is all we get. This is the thread to share famous atheists throughout history, the evolution of atheism as an idea, and the ways in which atheists throughout history created community absent the church.
A comment on the framing of this week's trivia topic and the history of religion and atheism:
The idea that atheism is a group of people "absent the church" is not inaccurate, but it's also artificially limiting and a Christian-colonialist conceit. To pose atheism as "not Christianity" is problematic both because it excludes so many nontheistic philosophies and spiritualities in the world. It ignores the reality that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are religions that all claim roots in the same Abrahamic god. In a discussion about a human phenomenon, even in a thread with relaxed rules, I believe it is poor practice to place Christianity as the default against which all other religions, philosophies, and spiritualities are compared or experienced.
There are today, of course, atheists from every cultural background, many of which were not Christianized. Hindu atheism has a long history which, though not my area of expertise, I believe predates Christian contact with South Asia.
Buddhism is older than Christianity and is frequently described as an atheistic religion because of its lack of a personal god.
Tim Whitmarsh argues in his 2016 book, Battling the Gods, that atheism was not uncommon and reasonably acceptable in polytheistic societies such as ancient Greece.
I'll leave it there for now. I think this thread is worthwhile and going to be interesting. I am disappointed in the artificial and unnecessarily narrow framing of the topic in the opening post.
While not explicitly an atheist, Lucretius was an important figure in the secularisation of western philosophy. Here's a quote from De Rurum Natura (On the Nature of Things, c. 59 BCE):
There are many worlds in nature and they are not controlled intimately by the gods: "Under no circumstances must it be considered likely that this one earth and heaven alone has been formed and that those particles of matter outside it achieve nothing... You must acknowledge the existence elsewhere of other aggregations of matter similar to this world of ours... In the totality of created things there is nothing solitary; everything belongs to some family, and each species has very many members... You can see that nature is her own mistress and is exempt from the oppression of arrogant despots, accomplishing everything by herself, spontaneously and independently, free from the jurisdiction of the gods. For-- and here call to witness the sacred, peacefully tranquil minds of the gods, who pass placid days and a life of calm-- who has the power to rule the entirety of the immeasurable." The world grew and now declines. "AI things gradually decay and head for the reef of destruction, exhausted by the long lapse of time."
While he didn't directly deny the existence of gods, he believed that they had no hand in maintaining the world or intervening in its functioning; it was a pretty revolutionary idea for the time and place!
Can someone tell me about the Cult of Reason? How did France decide to make a “state-sponsored atheistic religion” and why? We’re there other things like this in history?