Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (48 page)

The
Bārhaspatya-sūtras
captured the most important Cārvāka ideas
.
Written around the third century BCE, these sūtras have been lost except for a few fragments quoted in other (mostly unfriendly) sources. Many of those surviving bits criticize or contradict religious doctrines directly, saying

Religion is a human invention.

Nothing is wrong with sensual pleasure.

Death is the end of existence.

Direct experience is the only valid kind of evidence.

Hindu religious rituals are ignorant and unmanly.

The authors of the Vedas, the sacred books of Hinduism, are “buffoons, knaves, and demons.”

Given how forceful their criticisms of religion were, it’s not too surprising that the powers that be persecuted the followers of Cārvāka, or that most of their texts — including the
Bārhaspatya-sūtras —
conveniently went missing.

Listening to Al-Razi on “Fraudulent” Muhammad

Sometimes the dividing line between a culture’s prized and hated books runs right down the middle of a single author. The tenth century Persian physician and philosopher Abu Bakr al-Razi was just such an author, and
On the Refutation of Revealed Religions
is a book on the naughty side of the line.

I can only imagine the confusion among friends and admirers of al-Razi. They couldn’t help loving his incredible contributions to science and medicine — alleviating suffering, defining new disease treatments, isolating new compounds, showing endless compassion for the less fortunate, and saving countless lives. But I have to think there were some awkward silences when he called Muhammad a fraud and all religion a hoax.

The same cloud of confusion befuddled the admirers of other famous religious doubters, from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Edison to Susan B. Anthony to Albert Einstein. Their cultures bent over backwards to celebrate their achievements without drawing any attention to their doubt. Al-Razi presented the very same challenge to his tenth century Islamic fans.

On the Refutation of Revealed Religions
dismantled the whole idea of prophecy, brick by rational brick, arguing among other things that it makes zero sense for Allah to give prophetic knowledge to a few rather than to everyone at once.

Al-Razi encouraged a really fertile line of questioning: If you were God/Allah, would it make a lick of sense to do things the way they have been done? Most people take for granted the idea that the deity revealed truth through a few chosen prophets. Moses talked to a bush, Joseph Smith found golden plates, Muhammad talked to Gabriel, and Jesus talked . . . to himself, I guess. But when you put yourself in the Holy Loafers for just a minute, it starts to look like an odd way of doing things. It does make sense, though, as a way for a few ambitious folks with a healthy prophet motive to get things started.

Not too many people have had the chance to follow al-Razi’s reasoning. Many of the more than 200 books he wrote have survived to be enshrined in the annals of Islamic history. But these stinging critiques of religion, for some reason, were misplaced along the way.

Discovering the First Explicitly Atheist Book — Theophrastus Redivivus

Sometime in the 1650s, just as the Scientific Revolution was breaking into a run, several copies of an anonymous book began circulating around Europe — a book filled to the brim with forceful arguments against belief in God.

Theophrastus redivivus
started by declaring that every great philosopher in every age has been an atheist (whether he could openly admit it or not), that all religions are fictions, and that anyone claiming to have proof of the existence of a god is lying or mentally ill. That was just on the first
page.

The rest was a collection of arguments against belief by writers and thinkers through the ages — a kind of freethought anthology — and the first book-length work of atheist thought produced in Europe.

Passed secretly from hand to hand and house to house,
Theophrastus
touched off a century of whispered discussions and arguments about the existence of God and spawned more than 200 anonymous pamphlets, essays, and handwritten books arguing against religious belief, known collectively as the
clandestina.

It’s hard to really get inside the mind of a person from the 17th century, to fully grasp how different the world looked before all those later centuries happened. Atheism wasn’t just a weird minority opinion at the time. For most people, it was completely
unthinkable
that God didn’t exist. A 17th-century understanding of science — no matter what century a person actually lives in — makes it bone-crushingly obvious that an intelligent designer created the world. As a result, atheism fascinated and repelled the 17th-century mind. Some people in the period even considered atheism to be evidence of serious mental illness. And you know what? If I were alive in the 17th century, before science began to really fill in the gaps, I’d probably have to agree.

Around 1700, a different breed of atheist tract appeared, one that didn’t just collect atheist opinion from the past but made new and compelling arguments for atheism and against religious belief, including some informed by the new Scientific Revolution. The ball set rolling by
Theophrastus
was headed straight for the Age of Reason, knocking over the pins of superstition as it went.

The impact of the clandestina was huge. Many of the main arguments and ideas of the Enlightenment started in these secret, anonymous documents. After centuries of religion arguing with itself through the Reformation and several religious wars, the very idea of religious belief was finally getting a sustained challenge.

But unlike those religious wars, the atheist’s main weapons, then as now, were words, arguments, and ideas.

Making a Whispered Myth Real: The Treatise of the Three Impostors

The rumor of a book that called Jesus a liar and fake, spoken in hushed voices, started as far back as the 13th century. Sure, it said the same about Moses and Muhammad — but impugning the character of Jesus was the real attention-getter in medieval Europe.

All the whisperers seemed to agree on the title of this rumored book —
The Treatise of the Three Impostors —
as well as the basic thrust, that the three biggest prophets of all time were liars. But no one could agree on who wrote the mysterious thing. Some pointed to Averroes, a 12th-century Islamic overachiever in the al-Razi mold. Others even suggested Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, who went to war with two Popes and famously refused to believe anything that reason couldn’t explain.
(Red flag!)
As the centuries rolled by, everyone with a reputation for religious skepticism joined the lineup of possible authors — even if they were born centuries after the birth of the rumor.

Funny thing, though: Even as the rumor passed from one generation to the next, nobody ever seemed to have seen the actual book.

Then all at once, in the late 17th century, copies of
The Treatise of the Three Impostors
were everywhere. Europe, already reeling from scores of secret manifestos challenging and ridiculing religious belief, suddenly had another shocker to deal with.