Atheist Forum

I've just started reading a book on the history of Atheism, and it looks fascinating.

We tend to think of atheism as an opposing force to religion, but the study of its history shows that it has murky origins.

Who were the earliest chronicled atheists and what were their pholosophies? In prehistory, what forms would atheism have taken?

It would seem that religeons evolved, frpm anamism and shamanism through to pantheism to monotheism.

We like to think that atheism was the next step, that as modern rational people we have outgrown the need for religon.

But atheism existed back in the pantheistic days of the ancient greeks.

Did it exist in prehistoric anamist times?

When cave-dwellers were painting animals on cave walls to encourage the hunt, and draping themselves in skins and doing dances were there any around the fire that thought "what a pile of crap?"

My first post here, I'll see if I can follow up with what I discover as I read the book.

Stew

Atheism emerged with the dawn of humanity. We are all born atheists, since none of us have any beliefs in God at such a young age. Sure, we are passive atheists, but atheists nonetheless.

What about the dawn of life?

Hehe, unless bacteria ARE gods!!! Now that would be cool.

New religion of they day: Bacteriolism

Well you take your origional argument a step further. Simple cells we're not replicated into Theists. They were natually created Atheists.

But religion was not around 4 billion years ago. So I would suspect that until the time Religion is created nobody is neither classified as Theist or Atheist.

There is much debate over whether we are born atheist or not.

Both camps like to take the claim, to try to show that theirs is the "natural" state.

I think it very probable that we are naturaly religious as this may have helped family, clan and tribe cohesion in our early evolution as a species.

It's possible too that our religeosity is a byproduct of other evolved behaviour. For example, we are very good at recognising pattern, a good survival trait, but it is faulty and makes us spot pattern where it doesn't exist.

Some Oxford professor claims that belief in God is a natural development. Children at a very young age develop a belief in God because they need it to explain certain things. This belief is held into adulthood where it is passed through generations.

Passive atheism is therefore the natural default, whereas active atheism is the one which we learn.

Thats just wrong. The only thing kids wonder is how far they can fly if they ride off a ramp in their shiny new bike.

This is John 3:16 of atheism

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