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
... human culture as far back as we can trace it. The problem lies with the normative claims built on that observation. Too often religious practice is imagined to be the regular state of affairs, needing no explanation, whereas any.
... claims, and fortunately it is not our job to evaluate them here. The crucial point is that they can all be taken to buttress the normative view of religion. They project the idea that supernatural belief is fundamental to humanity. They ...
... claim raises a separate question, since the processes whereby the temple cult in Jerusalem adopted Yahweh as their one god were complex and long-lived and are not fully understood. I am persuaded by those who see monotheism in the ...
... claim to be divinely inspired (as the rhapsode Ion does in Plato}s dialogue of the same name), but their aim was to ... claims that ¡the plan of Zeus was coming to pass.¢ It looks as if the king of the gods has some kind of program that ...
... claims inspiration from the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (¡Memory¢). The language in which they are composed is not everyday Greek: the diction is elevated and archaic and embedded in a verse form (the dactylic hexameter) that ...
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 | |