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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... words survive written by the Greek medical writer Galen alone than of the literature of ancient Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, and Israel combined. Add in the huge amount of material culture, art, stone inscription, and papyrus that Greece ...
... word today. It found itself in a vibrant eastern Mediterranean trading bloc, with strongest cultural links to Egypt, the Levant, and Anatolia (Turkey), whose western seaboard they populated in such wealthy cities as Miletus, Ephesus ...
... word. There were (as in all societies) plenty of people with strong views on the nature of the gods, but all they could do was clamor to be heard above the hubbub. There were no social mechanisms whose jobs were to create consensus in ...
... word with supernatural powers. In Egypt, the god Thoth was credited with the invention of literacy. Although Egyptians used writing for a variety of administrative purposes, they had one particular script (known to the Greeks as ...
... word of a god. Rather, they cast themselves as huge, sweeping accounts of events that happened long ago; they are based on knowledge that would be normally inaccessible to a mere mortal, in a predominantly oral culture. The Muses are ...
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 | |