Atheism In The Ancient World
Atheism In The Ancient World The Comanche, Pirahã and Greek Mindset STONE AGE HERBALIST One of the most pre-caricatured images today is that of the online atheist. He is a figure of mockery and ridicule - bearded, fat, unkempt, donning a fedora hat - in a word, low-status. Prior to this atheism has long been associated with left-wing thought, or as a consequence of left-wing thought. Atheism otherwise has connotations of cultural Judaism, the hippy movement, the rational freethinking scientist or some kind of unorthodox fringe character. Atheism in historical periods is not given much thought, with the exception of the ‘New-Atheist’ project to create a pedigree from Antiquity onwards. The presumption from many strands of thought is that religion belongs to a primal age of human development; this meta-story that humans are ‘story tellers’ who need to create gods and deities to ‘make sense’ of the world. On this point I am not so sure. Many simple hunter-gatherer peoples do not see...
