"ATHEISTS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD"

Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Knopf, 2015) (I think this relatively short book is an very worthwhile read, with implications on the matter of religious tolerance in contemporary American society. Tolerance of those of "other" religious beliefs, but especially those who are nonbelievers. "This book is about atheists in the ancient world, primarily in Greece: their ideas, there innovations, their battles, their persecution. It is a work of history, not of proselytism. It is not my aim to prove the truth (or indeed falsehood) of atheism as a philosophical position. I do, however, have a strong conviction--a conviction that has hardened in the course of the researching and writing of this book--that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life." Id. at ix (emphasis added). "Since the early twentieth century . . . classical awareness has shrunk with alarming rapidity. Much of the blame for our collective blindness the long history of atheism lies with an educational system that fails to acknowledge the crucial role of Greco-Roman thought in shaping of Western secular modernity. This loss of consciousness of the classical heritage is what has allowed the 'modernist mythology' to take root. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that eighteenth-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods." Id. at 11-12. "The god of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam holds power in the absolute. The power of Greek gods, by contrast, is relative to others: it consists in the ability to beat down rivals (whether mortal or immortal), to quell dissent, to emerge victorious in battle. . . . There is a reason for this difference. Greece was, fundamentally, an honor-based society, and honor was generated--for humans and gods alike--through success in competition with others." Id. at 43-44. "As a rule, Greek religion had very little to say about morality and the nature of the world. . . . When Greeks pondered the nature of the world, they did so through the medium of philosophy, nor organized religion." Id. at 52. "Big events demand big explanations. Athens of the late fifth century BC, however, brimming with intellectual inventiveness and thrumming with a sense of its own modernity, could no longer straightforwardly accept divine causality in this way." "Blaming the gods for human action had begun to look like evasion of responsibility." Id. at 74. The conclusion seems inevitable that the violent 'bothering' as atheists of those who hold different religious views was overwhelmingly a Judeo-Christian creation, which was then projected back onto the polytheists." Id. at 240. Cosmological and philosophical debate remained intense, of course, but it was unthinkable outside of the framework of Christian monotheism.Individuals surely experienced doubt and disbelief, just as they always have in all cultures, but they were invisible to dominant society and so have left no trace in the historical record. It is this blind spot that has sustained the illusion that disbelief outside of the post-Enlightenment West is unthinkable. The apparent rise of theism in the past two centuries, however, is not a historical anomaly; view from eh longer perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the global dominance of monotheistic regions and the resultant inhabit to acknowledge the existence of disbelievers." Id. at 242.).