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
... archaic Greece that was its characteristic feature. There was no national hub, no capital, no single, stable core radiating Hellenism outward. Around 1,200 separate Greek poleis have been identified for the period between 650 and 323 BC ...
... archaic period, with no one form achieving dominance. On Lesbos, in northwest Anatolia, and in the northeastern region of the mainland a branch called Aeolic was spoken (and had its own subdivisions). In southwest Anatolia, in the ...
... archaic age through to late antiquity, is one of both expansion and centralization. Expansion because Greek became the dominant language and culture in the eastern Mediterranean and much of the Near East, and centralization because in ...
... archaic period the many gods of Greek polytheism met the needs of a complex assemblage of independent states, so the one god of Christianity reflected the aspirations of the political classes of the later Roman Empire. Monotheism and ...
... archaic and embedded in a verse form (the dactylic hexameter) that has a religious aura to it: it is sometimes used, for example, for oracles. The divinity of the Homeric poems, however, has nothing to do with the revealed word of a god ...
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 | |