From Atheist Perspectives



From Atheist Perspectives –

The History and Suppression of Atheism

Its suppression by punishment, social pressure and censorship through ‘education’, language, elitism and censorship

That so few people are conversant with the long history of atheism, and the arguments against religion, in a country in which there is universal education from the age of five, is a testament to the extent and success of those who have worked so tirelessly to suppress it.

One could be forgiven for thinking that Atheism is something new. The reality is that there has always been non-belief but, until now, the power of the Churches has been able to suppress its expression in other than closely confined circles. Now, with the Internet revolution, it is at least possible for everyone to consider the history of atheism.)

Much of the material in Jonathan Miller's 'A Rough History of Disbelief' Television Series is from the sources referenced here.

The History

The earliest documented references to Atheist thought go back to the great thinkers of Greece, Rome, and before them to the first mathematicians and ‘scientists’ of Egypt and Babylonia. The philosophers of the Ionian culture were described as having a standard of living that ‘was too obviously the product of human energy, resource, and initiative, for it to acknowledge any great debt to the Gods.’ [1]Although the Pythagoreans did not entirely reject mysticism, they introduced a rational element into the beliefs of the day. The Pythagoreans were criticised for their search for facts. The search for truth was seen as a distrust of religious norms, and throughout the confusion of theories, some more preposterous than others, there can be seen the search for a release from the set religious ideas that had gone before.

The introduction to James Thrower’s ‘A Short History of Western Atheism’ (RPA) [2] says: "Atheism and Agnosticism are often presented as brief isolated flourishings of something wholly exceptional." Thrower himself shows that at some particular moments in history, atheism has expressed itself in opposition to, and therefore in relation to the prevailing religious thought. But in the long term, atheism has shown itself as a continuous stream of thought inevitably emerging and re-emerging as an important and independent approach to the world. Absolute Atheism is naturalistic and speculative.

Aristotle, who was not atheistic in the full modern sense, recognised the emerging differences between those who described the world in terms of myth and legend and the multiple gods of the old religions, and those who were beginning to see the world in terms of natural forces, which could not only be explained in scientific terms but could even be predicted by recognising the natural signs. This notion they learnt from the astrological studies and predictions of the Egyptians. These were among the first documented inklings that the world was ordered by natural law and not some divine plan. He is credited with advancing rational philosophy. His ideas were an inspiration to later thinkers of the Middle Ages in Britain.

The Greek philosophers, while not being atheist or even agnostic in the modern sense, laid the foundations of secular thought by first discarding the idea of mythical gods who personified natural events. They pointed out that people described their gods as being like themselves (Xenophanes), and decided that the heavenly bodies were natural objects. (Anaxagoras). The next step in the process was the proposition that there was a ‘single primary substance of being’ initially suggested as ‘air’, and further, that this was associated with mind, ‘The stuff of life’ by Anaximenes. The primary importance of mind and thinking was being recognised rather than the supremacy of belief. These philosophers were the first to challenge the notions of gods and religions of their day, and it was a risky business. For their trouble they were often accused of ‘impiety’ and risked banishment from Athens.

The first stirrings of atheism were against the literal belief that natural phenomena were caused by the Gods of ancient Greece, ideas like those inherited from pagan and pantheistic religions. The traditional religious view was that the Gods had a hand in all human affairs and needed to be worshipped, adored, pleaded with, and placated with animal and human sacrifices — a pattern that could also be seen in other religions on other continents such as South and Central American civilisations, Inca, Maya, and Aztec.

The 16th century was one of unrivalled un-belief (relatively) and alienation, spiritual and temporal, brought about by the excesses of the Inquisition on the Continent, the oppressive nature of the Church in demanding increased tithes, the upsurge of conflict between the Roman and Protestant Churches, and their mutual persecution, and the fanaticism of the Puritans in Britain.

A further step in the change in thinking about religion was exemplified in the Renaissance humanism of Erasmus in the 16th century. These humanists drew their inspiration first from the Greek sceptics and Stoics and particularly from the writings of Sextus Empiricus, "last and greatest of the thinkers in the sceptical tradition." But this was not humanism in the modern sense, and certainly not atheistic or even agnostic. It was more a re-think of the different religions, the authoritarian versus the ‘liberal’, and the orthodox versus the ‘nonconformist’. It saw the separation of ‘reason’ and ‘faith’, which drove a permanent wedge between theology and philosophy.

In 18th- and 19th-century Europe came an upsurge in the study of religion from a scientific, rational, sociological perspective. This was no longer simply theological, philosophical study by the religious to confirm the "revealed" views. Kant, Comte, Hegel, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx studied religion as a sociological and political phenomenon, and in various ways tried to explain its place and raison d’etre, but did not explain the existence of ‘religious experience’. Only with the 20th-century development of the Neurosciences did it become possible to locate the focus of such ‘experience’ within the brain, and explain its nature as a function of brain chemistry and electromagnetic activity, described and interpreted in the only language available, that of religion. [3]

Marx, Darwin, and Piaget contributed to the understanding of the evolutionary process, of the development of rational and  scientific thought. They described in their different ways the processes by which human beings move through stages, towards true understanding. They have evolved; through the evolution of the species, the society, and the self, and every human being is a product of this process of evolution. In his detailed explanation of these ideas in his Internet site ‘ontogeny phylogeny' [4] on the origin of religion, Jon Squire poses the question, "if we are in the rational age, why are there still religions?" and gives August Comte’s view that "it would be a mistake to expect a new social order, any more than a new intellectual order, to emerge smoothly from the death throes of an old", and goes on to say "As the new state becomes fully functional with the evolving scientific rational age, the faculties of objectivity and understanding of interrelationships will slowly become apparent. The modern evolving secular society is just the beginning of Piaget’s final formal operation stage, the ‘Age of Reason’, the new religion."

‘The Necessity of Atheism’ by P. B. Shelley, published in 1811, for which he was expelled from University College Oxford, was described by Percy Vaughan as "almost the first publication in England in which atheism is openly advanced"; and in an article on the Early Shelley Pamphlets, Percy Vaughan said -"up to the time of Shelley’s youthful challenge, only one English author, so far as I can discover, had ventured to adopt, as expressing his opinion, a word (atheism) which had previously been used merely as a term of abuse" and referred to a letter by William Hammon (a pseudonym of William Turner, a surgeon in Liverpool [5]).

The 18th and 19th centuries were a period during which a widening circle of intellectual opinion in Europe talked, wrote, and published articles and pamphlets on atheism, secularism, and naturalism (humanism) — Diderot, Voltaire, Buffon, T. H. Huxley, Tyndall, Carlisle, Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersoll, J. S. Mill, Matthew Arnold and G. W. Foote amongst the most well known. By the end of the 20th century, the number of atheists was rising, with figures in all walks of life willing to declare their non-belief and even challenge the Church; including professors and scholars, scientists and philosophers, educationalists and professionals, artists and entertainers, now too numerous to mention. In addition, the established Churches are suffering a slow decline in membership that for the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches is reaching near freefall in some countries. However if they have been complacent, there is no reason to think that they will not fight back with the skills that they have honed to perfection  in the past.

The apparent preponderance of men in the history is partly because of the exclusion of women from higher education and academe and participation within the intellectual elites, their supposed role in  domesticity, and their exclusion by men, wherever possible from public life and political activism. But also because women activists were pilloried and derided, and their activism not given credence or prominence.

However, despite their handicaps and the abuse they suffered, over the 18th, 19th & 20th centuries,   women were among the most prominent promoters of freethought. And campaigned tirelessly  in all the progressive movements, for the abolition of slavery, women's rights - to own property, vote, become educated and take a full part in public life - against flogging and ill treatment of criminals,  children's rights and political campaigns on health and education. and in the peace movement.

These women were denied publication in many cases, and suffered person attack, not only for their freethinking, but for being women activists. They were enormously courageous in public speaking and political activism. Their contribution is only now being recognised by the publication of the work of more than 50 British and American women freethinkers, by the Freedom From Religion Foundation and A.L Gaylor's book Women Without Superstition."No Gods, No Masters" [7]It includes some of the most clearly argued writing against the church and its socially reactionary and often downright cruel attitudes.

So what happened to these flowerings of free thought from the great thinkers and scholars of Greece and Rome? We see continuous if limited challenges to religious thought from the few courageous exponents of non-belief in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and the thinkers, poets and writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. A register of the most influential philosophers, reformers and scientists of the last 500 years, would be rich in sceptics, humanists, and atheists: Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and Auguste Comte; Isaiah Berlin, Bertrand Russell and J. P. Sartre. So, why is atheism not better represented in popular culture?

Please acknowledge the source

shaw.

© secularsites.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download