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
... certainly, that some modern scholars have allowed their own religious values to percolate into their writing about antiquity. Even today, scholarly discussions of ancient atheism can prompt undignified tirades against ¡populist ...
... Certainly the inscription itself is of a pretty rudimentary type, the language lacking in any grand, rhetorical pretension. Of course, because it is a temple inscription, this is a morality tale, and the disbeliever gets his comeuppance ...
... certainly not uncontroversial, and there were periods of severe repression. But as a rule, polytheismxthe belief in many godsxwas infinitely more hospitable toward disbelievers than monotheism. Under Christianity, by contrast, there was ...
... certainly, central to modern practice (particularly in Protestant Christianity), but in fact the ancient Greek sources rarely speak of it, prioritizing instead the sense of collective involvement with the community. Viewed in terms of ...
... Certainly, atheism was not always approved of in Greek polytheism. Occasionally it was forcibly repressed. In general, however, it was tolerated by the religious because there was little interest in generating religious orthodoxy ...
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 | |