A new book:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/17/atheism-has-ancient-roots-c...
Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.
In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.
Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.
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It wasn't obvious atheism has been around since religion has been? Or am I not understanding something here?
It probably isn't obvious for many religious people.
Some religious people do not even know what Atheism means.
They still think it is some kind of satanic thing.
Just found this review of the book in The Independant .....
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/battling-t...
I noted the article contained this snippet .....
"If we accept that the Israelites in Jerusalem dumped all other gods in favour of the jealous, unique Yahweh sometime after 539BC, then by that period Xenophanes of Colophon had already recorded his scepticism. In other words, atheism may be "at least as old as the monotheistic religions of Abraham""