The funniest thing about Atheism is that it specifically goes against Christianity and Islam. Native American – or basically most pre-literate – religions, for the most part, would go unscratched by any of these arguments. Confucianism is perfectly safe. The majority of Hindu swamis would agree with you in full, Namelis.

Christianity, Atheism, Islam, Scientology, Agnosticism, whatever. They’re all the product of basic Western concepts and constructions. I find it funny that you people are arguing debates that pre-date Christ and both basically taking the same side using the same mental tools, but differing over trifling details.

Who made up the old metaphor about the two frogs arguing at the bottom of a well?

“However, atheism has always existed. Diagoras of Melos is a good example. He lived and died during a time in which those accused of atheism were capable of being executed.”

Right, my point was that christianity and atheism are both a product of western rationalism, and that the debates are largely rooted in Greek thought and Greek mental tools which we’ve inherited.

Listen: the Ionian schools – debatably the founders of western rationalism – are mainly known via Plato and the Stoics. To my knowledge, not a single one of the Ionian authors survives except in references and quotations. So what do we even really know about these guys from the perspective of historiography? Fucking fuck all.

Now Plato, the man who invented the western concept of the “soul” was an atheist as well, but believed in a higher existence defined by ideas, which he associated with the soul itself.

The stoics, likewise, rejected the old myths and replaced them with an atheistic great spirit from which all souls are derived and eventually return.

Have you ever seen Atheists on the Internet quoting Strabo as an early atheist? Read the intro to the geography sometime. He was a fairly typical Stoic, although he didn’t seem to care either way. That quote actually comes from his attempt to defend Homer – the Greek equivalent of Moses – and to say that he (homer) was still the greatest arbiter of objective truth with or without Gods.

The Greeks might have come up with the basic impulse that the mythologies weren’t true, but it barely matters. The mythologies were probably imported from Anatolia. The original Greek religion – the fundamental pulse of Greek thought – was probably in its original form a highly conceptual, myth-light one like we find in Hector’s Theogeny.

The point is, what we in the west, when confronted with a divide between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ is merely another way of explaining basic issues fundamental to our worldviews.

Listen, what a culture believes is just a single element in how a culture organizes and behaves itself. If anything it’s a reflection of social organization, rather than a defining feature of social organization. Religion doesn’t “control” people or “brainwash” people, it explains what people believe and how they behave in a particular culture.

The Greeks replaced Homer with Jesus and Moses and continued to have the same fights about the nature of truth – ones that the Jews never had.

Read the Talmud sometime. You’ll quickly realize that the Jews saw contradictions in the old Testament, but ones that never even occurred to Christians, and which then solved in very non-Christian ways. Only a century later, the very Platonistic church fathers answered all the completely different contradictions in the Bible and answered them with the help of Plato and Plautinus. Because Christians – like scientists, atheist, muslims – are basically just Greco-Romans that borrowed a few foreign stories.

And, now, Atheists are using what is primarily Aristotlean logic to shoot down religion. Often they’re using the same types of arguments St. Augustine used. Hell, there are passages I could quote from Augustine where I could just cross out ‘God’ and replace ‘Science’ and post it on my blog and you’d never know?

Is that really a problem? No, not really. Like I said: religion, mythology, science, philosophy… it’s just a way for culture to explain itself.

@Goldfinger: Speak of the Devil.

Erg, sorry, I meant ‘the same arguments as St. Thomas’ not Augustine. Fuck me silly.