Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (6 page)

Atheists in ancient Greece, where they were seldom welcome

Religious skeptics in early Islam who called Muhammad a liar

A hero in 13th century Icelandic legend who said, “It is folly to believe in gods” — then lived happily ever after anyway

Three 14th century French villagers whose disbelief was ferreted out by a shocked bishop during the Inquisition

The thread of atheism in the ancient and medieval world is a story that very few people know. Even
atheists
are usually in the dark about this part of their history. Read Chapters
4
and
5
, and then share them with an atheist you love.

The Enlightenment

By the early 18th century, disbelief was gathering serious steam in Europe. Secret documents challenging religious belief had been circulating for 50 years, just steps ahead of the censors. French parishioners going through the papers of their Catholic priest who died in 1729 found copies of a book, written by the priest for them, telling how much he detested and disbelieved the religion he’d taught them for 40 years.

By the end of the century, philosophers in France, Germany, and England were openly challenging religious power and ideas and establishing modern concepts of human rights and individual liberty. It all culminated, for better and worse, in the French Revolution, when a brief flirtation with an atheist state was followed by the Cult of the Supreme Being and the Reign of Terror — at which point atheism went back underground for a bit. (For more on this, refer to
Chapter 6
.)

The 19th century

The idea that God didn’t really exist never completely went away, even when someone like Napoleon shut it down for a while. It was always bubbling under the surface and occasionally shooting out sideways through someone who just couldn’t stand to keep it quiet.

The poet Percy Shelley proved to be one such person, getting himself kicked out of Oxford in 1811 for expressing an atheist opinion. Then the early feminists of England and the United States made it plenty clear that they considered religion to be a stumbling block in the way of women’s rights.

Science really put the wind in the sails of atheism in the 19th century. By paying close attention to the natural world, Darwin turned himself from a minister in training to an agnostic and solved the complexity problem that prevented so many people from letting go of God. As the biologist Richard Dawkins once said, atheism might have been possible before Darwin, but Darwin made it possible to be an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.” But a flurry of activity after Darwin’s death tried to hide his loss of faith, including some selective slicing and dicing of his autobiography and a false deathbed conversion story dreamt up by a British evangelist with little respect for the Ninth Commandment.

In Darwin’s wake, a golden age of freethought opened up in the United States and the United Kingdom. It’s all laid out for your enjoyment in
Chapter 7
.

The 20th century

Atheism also doesn’t guarantee good behavior any more than religion does, and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” becomes a tragically apt phrase in the 20th century. There are plenty of examples of corruption and immorality in positions of unchecked power, both by atheists (such as Mao Zedong in China, Joseph Stalin in the USSR, and Pol Pot in Cambodia) and theists (such as Adolf Hitler in Germany, Francisco Franco in Spain, and Idi Amin in Uganda).

But there’s also good news, including the growth of humanism as a movement and court victories for the separation of church and state — something that benefits both the church and the state.

The 20th century also saw one of the most fascinating developments in the history of religion as two God-optional religions formed and flourished: Unitarian Universalism and Humanistic Judaism.
Chapter 8
gives you more information.

Atheism today

A movement called The New Atheism was born the moment religion flew planes into buildings on September 11, 2001. Though atheists had been around for centuries, the horror and clarity of that moment, and the very clear part played by religion, was the last straw and a call to action for countless nonreligious people. A powerful, unapologetic new form of atheism grew up in response to that moment, including countless books and blogs calling for an end to the free pass from criticism that religion has traditionally enjoyed.

A huge upsurge in atheist thought, identity, organization, and action followed the initial wave. Driven by the young medium of the Internet, the freethought movement did in ten years what many other social movements take generations to achieve.

A quieter, more humanistic, but no less passionate form of disbelief rose up in the wake of the New Atheists — one that makes an effort to discern between benign and malignant expressions of religion, seeks common ground between the religious and the nonreligious, and focuses on building humanist community and defining a positive vision for the future. These two sides of contemporary atheism spend a lot of time kvetching at each other over the best way forward. Though it does break a little china, kvetching can be a good way of sorting good ideas from bad.

Chapter 9
brings you a hopelessly incomplete but hopefully tantalizing snapshot of the big, messy, complicated wonder of atheism today.

Examining Atheism in the Written Word

The history of atheism is the history of an idea. To understand that history, you have to look primarily at the written word — books, letters, diaries, pamphlets, and more recently, blogs. The chapters in Part III take a survey of the great written works expressing and exploring the idea that gods don’t exist, including

A telling two-sentence fragment from an ancient Greek play

An ancient Indian
sutra
that suggests religion is a human invention and the authors of the sacred Vedas are “buffoons” and “knaves”

An ancient Chinese philosopher who explains why “heaven” can’t have a mind

An Islamic doubter who calls Muhammad “fraudulent” and dismantles the idea of prophecy

A secret, anonymous 17th-century book of skeptical writings from the past and suggests that every great philosopher has been an atheist