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
Niðurstöður 6 - 10 af 87
... idea of a common place of pilgrimage like Jerusalem, Mecca, or Santiago de Compostela is alien to Greek polytheism. Greece simply had no political or religious hub. Delphi, Olympia, and the island of Delos, for sure, were universally ...
... idea of a Greek priest or priestess using his or her influence to sway public debates on (for example) the definition of marriage or the treatment of the poor was unthinkable. Priesthood was a role within the community, not a spiritual ...
... idea of a spirit that survives after death? To understand Greek religion one needs to cast off such assumptions and see it on its own terms, as an articulation of local identity within the community. But even so, all of these features ...
... idea that the book embodied the divinity of its sacred subject matter shaped the formation of the Christian Bible and the Qur}an. From antiquity onward, the idea of 2 a material book as the ultimate source of truth has Chapter 2: Good ...
... 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 Egyptian writing systems ¡hieroglyphic¢ and ¡hieratic,¢ precisely to mark the ...
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 | |