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That is not quite correct - the problem you are ignoring is that of the available (potential) sources.
I already wanted to make the distinction between active and passive atheism before I read your post, but it fits in here quite well.
The problem is that both kind of atheists - the ones who simply don't believe or bother with "the spiritual", and the ones who actively proclaim their disbelief and disagreement with theistic claims - do not leave much source material, especially "in the earliest civilizations".
Non-verbal sources are already difficult to interpret: does that painting on a dark cave wall have some "magical" meaning, or is it just artistic expression? But one can safely say that people who do not believe in a magical component of cave paintings do not leave magic paintings on cave walls.
No source for these atheists.
As for the active atheists: without verbal sources it is quite difficult to find out if there were humans who disagreed with the "prayers, rituals and sacrifices". They didn't leave learned essays shredding their theistic opponents.
I like to think that as soon as there was some mumbo-jumbo chanting priest / shaman / prophet, there was a skeptic who didn't believe it.
Before even our distant ancestors had evolved the imagination to create all of the various religions, there was atheism.
But go back far enough, and you'll find ancestors of humans who were not theists.
Bit of a tall order, but going by the fact that there is evidence of atheism in even the earliest writings, such as 'psalm 53.1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”Can you supply any examples we can consider?
by HerCrazierSelf
Quite simply I think most of humanity is predisposed to believe while there is a portion of us who just can't accept it as true. In previous centuries such people may have been killed or exiled for openly resisting the dominant religion of their area.
I personally didn't know what atheism was when I slid towards it. Want until after I stopped believing (but still pretended) that I found out. In essence I think atheism (or agnosticism) is not a matter of choosing not to believe but realizing that religious belief makes no sense to me. I could no more choose to believe than a believer can choose not to believe.
I think there are a large number of closet atheist & agnostics but like me they only tell a select few people for reasons of family harmony, dating, and to avoid the distrust that seems to exist towards nonbelievers.
Your idea implies a knowledge you don't have so you are just making an empty assertion. You do not know what's inside a baby's mind, heart or soul and you don't know if his heart is predisposed to religion or not. By the way, lenguage is not to be compared with religion.God is the origin of atheism! When God created a baby, what language does that baby speak? Alanguage!!! Not Chinese, English or any human language. What religion does that baby believe in? None! Only through time, will it become a Christian, Muslim, Buddhist etc..
Hm... that would mean that God is and atheist, wouldn't it?
Or it would mean that you are wrong... pick your choice.)
Neither you nor the christian poster who told about that psalm are right. That psalm doesn't imply the rejection of God by anyone since at that time that would have been an abomination (it still is, just that people before had more common sense) but implies a way of living that pretends that ignores God in order to satisfy themselves, in order to follow their own desires no matter what kind of desires where those, of lust, of money, of power, of "glory" and so on...Bit of a tall order, but going by the fact that there is evidence of atheism in even the earliest writings, such as 'psalm 53.1 The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.”
They are corrupt, doing abominable iniquity;
there is none who does good.'
Strongly disagree with what it says, but it is good evidence that atheists existed in old testement times. 600bc or earlier. it is not unreasonable to think that unbelief has existed so long as there has been humanity.
The point is that as recorded in the old testement people did not believe in God. There would not be any need to declare it an 'abomination' if said unbelievers did not exist.Neither you nor the christian poster who told about that psalm are right. That psalm doesn't imply the rejection of God by anyone since at that time that would have been an abomination (it still is, just that people before had more common sense) but implies a way of living that pretends that ignores God in order to satisfy themselves, in order to follow their own desires no matter what kind of desires where those, of lust, of money, of power, of "glory" and so on...
I am certainly tired of whenever a christian encounters an atheist they just throw that verse to them, it's not right and as we don't like atheists cherry-picking Bible verses so shouldn't we.
I'd say that the error is on your side here... your inability to overcome your preconceived ideas of the "spitiritual" as something real and the "magical" as "made-up, pretent".The error in your thinking (as revealed in your language) here is based on your automatic associations between spiritual and "magical"...sadly because you cannot perceive or think in these terms you prejudge anyone else's experience or ability to do so as made-up, pretend, etc.
How many children are born atheists?How many children are born Christian?
Well, in a nutshell, the theological position of atheism boils down to "I'm not convinced".What can I say. The answers here were a bit disappointing to be sincere.
No, I don't.I will tell my opinion on why atheism exists, and I hope I will explain myself fine because I think it's toph.
I want to start from the beginning, with philosohpy, because in order to understand the post-modern minds we have to understand the forces that shaped the Western civilization and that, in my opinion, caused atheism. Let's start, as I said, with philosohpy, and with someone that is appreciated in my religion, Plato.
For the ancient greek philosophers and especially for Plato, there is a form of cognition that is non-discursive, that means that it does not take place in lenguage. Most people are familiar with Plato's dividing line from "The Republic" where he makes a distinction between the sensible world and the intelligible or ideal world of ideas, then he divides the intelligible world into two parts.
For him, there is a higher form of cognition than mathematic reason or dialectic, this is the direct, unmediated, vision of "the good" or "the beautiful". This ultimate contemplation, or "theoria" of "the good" or "the beautiful" is the end of dialectics, but it is not something we can produce or practice as we can practice dialectics. This ultimate "theoria" comes, we can only be ready for it. We can only prepare for it, because this "theoria" is beyond our knowledge and is external from us.
This approach will be developed by the later platonists, missnamed "neo-platonists" such as Plotinus and Proclus and a deep religious outlook is formed, one that will have a titanic impact on Orthodox spirituality. While the platonists had no concept of God as a personal being and certainly no concept of creation ex-nihilo, but they believed in the ultimate transcendence of the good and the fact that it relies beyond speech and beyond dialectics and discursive reason as well as beyond sensory experience provided a way for Origen and Evagrius to express their belief in the transcendent God of the hebrews revealed in the person of Christ in the cultural idiom of their own day.
While this thought was charged with some dangers and Origen's ideas was proof enough of that it cannot be denied that when combined with a pshychological insight and exercises borrowed from the stoics provided the neptic Fathers with powerful conceptions and tools for explicating the Orthodox path to the knowledge of God.
At some point, the patristic vocabulary became standardized and the word "nous" started to referr exclusively or almost exclusively to this higher, non discursive faculty of cognition. "Theonia" came to referr exclusively to the lower, discursive faculty of cognition, and this usage, in fact, goes all the way back to Plato. This standardization stands with the fact that it corresponds with real, lived experiences in the lifes of the Fathers.
Thus, the Fathers speak of the purification of the heart of the soul, the "nous" and its descent into the deep heart of men as the necessary precondition of the inmediated encounter with Christ, indwelling through the Holy Spirit.
At some point, however, and here comes the origins of atheism, in my opinion, this form of higher cognition dissappeared completely in the Western culture, and so the possibility of knowing God by purificating yourself in order to become intuitively aware of Him.
Some Orthodox theologians as Fr. John Rommanides are to put the blame for this at the shoulders of Saint Augustine, but this would be quite unfair for the bishop of Hippo. Most recently, some roman-catholics theologians have pointed to Duns Scotus as the cause for this. Despite who is right and the truth relies somewhere in the middle, by the dawn of the modern era in the Western civilization only two forms of cognition existed: the impression or through the discursive reason. With the arise of the scientific method, combining these two a new form was created and it remains until this day as the dominant intellectual paradigm of modernity: scientific rationalism. And yet, in spite of its appearences, philosophicly speaking it's a failure. David Hume knew that it was a failure when he wrote his inquiry concerning human understanding. He began his book by asserting that when we think we think about two kinds of things: matters of fact (sensed data) and relations of ideas and the rest of his book lead him to discuss the problem that this kind of thought made.
The modern era is characterized by three distinct attitudes: first, that human beings are essentially individuals; second, that human reason—and this will later be expanded to include the scientific method—is autonomous; and third, that human reason is sufficient to answer our needful questions and solve our problems.
Let’s begin with this new-fangled belief that human beings are essentially individuals. Aristotle wrote, and more than once, that to be human is to be in community. In fact, he defines man as a political, that is, a social, animal. A man who deliberately absents himself from society is, according to Aristotle, either a god or an animal, that is, he is either above humanity or below it. The one thing he is not, however, is a human being. In fact, so strong was this belief among the Greeks that the Greek word for individual is actually “idiot.”
Now, this belief is shared by all pre-modern peoples, and even today by most non-European societies. The modern cult of the sovereign individual marching to the beat of his own drummer is a European invention. Indeed, Friedrich Nietzsche, who despised modernity for a number of other reasons, called the triumph of the individual the greatest flower of modernity.
We may wonder, then, what brought about this great shift. The introduction of nominalism into medieval philosophy certainly had something to do with it. Nominalism is the position that only individual things exist. General terms referring to abstractions such as “humanity” or “human nature” are just names. Thus, a nominalistic anthropology would aver that there is really no such thing as humanity, only individual people.
The emerging new physics may have also played a role. Thomas Hobbes thought of humans explicitly along the lines of discrete bodies in motion, that is, if the natural world is made up exclusively of discrete material bodies moving in space, then people can be defined in much the same way. Hobbes made this anthropological physics the basis of his famous political philosophy.
In addition, however, we should also consider the influence the loss of the concept of nous may have had. The noetic faculty is one of pure intuitive apprehension. Its vision of the beautiful and the good is direct and unmediated. The discursive reason, on the other hand, is object-oriented. It is directed either towards sense-data or towards its own internal structure. In either case, however, thought is mediated by symbols or language. It is not too difficult to see how this could lead to the idea that each person is an individual cognitive center. In religion, this leads to the idea that each person is an individual interpreter of the Scriptures.
As long as one assumes that the natural world that all of these individuals perceive is one and uniform and that reason itself is universal and uniform, all is well. Once, however, one begins to entertain doubts about the objectivity of the world or of the universality of reason, then the whole program begins to unravel. I call this unraveling "post-modernism".
By way of contrast, let me draw your attention to the writings of the Fathers, particularly the greatest of the 20th-century theologians, Archimandrite Sophrony (Sakharov). Whether discussing the life of his mentor, St. Silouan, or his own experiences, Archim. Sophrony tells us that when the nous has been purified and encounters God in pure prayer, the soul becomes consciously aware not only of the unity of mankind but of all creation. This leads to the shedding of bitter tears for the world. These tears are not the product of sentimentality or emotion, but are a divine gift enabling the one who prays to enter into Christ’s intercessory prayer for all of creation. Do you see how the Orthodox method of prayer, noetic prayer, even when practiced by a monk living alone in a remote cell, leads not to egoism and isolation but to a noetic unity with God and with all of mankind?
Is this the same "God" that allegedly walked and talked in a garden that has no evidence of having existed, poofed people and animals into existence, and later, in a manner contrary to the modern understanding of genetics, populated the planet with a tiny group of individuals and animals that survived a global flood in an unbuildable boat, a flood that killed the dinosaurs in a manner that only *appears* to be 65 million years ago, because the Earth is really only somehow 6000 years old, yet remains, by every objective measure to date indistinguishable from nothing? Is this also a "Truth"?Every name must be capitalised. As my name "Alex" is capitalised, so hte name "Truth" must be, since Truth is not an idea or something abstract but a very real person, called Jesus Christ, God. He said so, "I am the Truth, the Way and the Life".
Ok, let us verify that. Put a babyborn in the jungle alone, with no contact with civilization and if he miraculously lives until, let's say, the age of 20, visit him, and you will see that he will already have a pantheon of gods.All of them. It is the default position.
Why wouldn't the garden exist?Is this the same "God" that allegedly walked and talked in a garden that has no evidence of having existed, poofed people and animals into existence, and later, in a manner contrary to the modern understanding of genetics, populated the planet with a tiny group of individuals and animals that survived a global flood in an unbuildable boat, a flood that killed the dinosaurs in a manner that only *appears* to be 65 million years ago, because the Earth is really only somehow 6000 years old, yet remains, by every objective measure to date indistinguishable from nothing? Is this also a "Truth"?
So primitive polytheism it is?Ok, let us verify that. Put a babyborn in the jungle alone, with no contact with civilization and if he miraculously lives until, let's say, the age of 20, visit him, and you will see that he will already have a pantheon of gods.
Since atheism doesn´t posit "God is impossible", this is completely irrelevant.
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