Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient WorldKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 10. nóv. 2015 - 304 síður How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. |
From inside the book
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... be, a society without gods. THERSANDER: Humans created gods. Primitive humans saw divinity in the sun, moon, and stars, in the cycles of the seasons. They lacked scientific understanding of matter, the cosmos, and nature. A Dialogue.
... nature. In time, politicians and rulers realized the power of religious belief and cynically twisted it to their own ends. There are no gods overseeing social order, punishing wrongdoing; that is simply what our leaders teach us, to ...
... nature of the gods, even to the point of dismissing them altogether. PreChristian atheism was certainly not uncontroversial, and there were periods of severe repression. But as a rule, polytheismxthe belief in many godsxwas infinitely ...
... natural borders: mountain ranges, valleys, gulfs, rivers, and seas. To travel from one part to another is often challenging. Everyone knows of Thermopylae, the narrow pass between Mount Oeta and the sea, where the invading Persian army ...
... nature: there was a high level of dialectical variation in the archaic period, with no one form achieving dominance. On Lesbos, in northwest Anatolia, and in the northeastern region of the mainland a branch called Aeolic was spoken (and ...
Efni
Battling the Gods | |
The Material Cosmos | |
Cause and Effect | |
Concerning the Gods I Cannot Know | |
Playing the Gods | |
Plato and the Atheists | |
Gods and Kings | |
Philosophical Atheism | |
Epicurus Theomakhos | |
With Gods on Our Side | |
Virtual Networks | |
Acknowledgments | |
Atheism on Trial | |