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
... sacred festivities took up a large part of the city}s annual calendar (a formidable 120 days in classical Athens) ... sacred and the secular realms. In democratic Athens, for example, the Council divided its items for discussion into ...
... sacred,¢ but its resources were on occasion used to equip the military). And equally obviously we should not assume that their sacred-secular distinction maps exactly onto our own. The important point is that they recognized that ...
... sacred 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 ...
... sacred book is inviolable: it should never be besmirched, let alone damaged. This conception is rooted in ancient Near Eastern traditions associating the written word with supernatural powers. In Egypt, the god Thoth was credited with ...
... sacred texts.1 Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religion is structured around the idea of holy scripture. For Greeks, by contrast, the idea of a text having magical properties was fundamentally alien. In fact, it was the Greeks who named ...
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 | |