&catherine said:
it strikes me that it is most probably impossible
to find any belief system that can be held consistently...
it's really easy. what about the position "everything's great" or
"everything is green cheese"? the problem is to get interesting,
rich positions that are also consistent. of course part of the
difficulty is that it's hardly clear what "consistency" really may be.
So it's not just a problem for atheism and religious
belief. For example, even agnosticism cannot be lived out in practise:
to say that one is "not sure" about the existence God, and is
therefore unsure about what foundations there might be for ethical and
moral positions,
why should agnostics not use alternative narratives to explain their
problematic actions? like maximising their/somebody else's pleasure,
or doing as they are told, or throwing coins as decision procedure?
&catherine said:
I was under the impression, you see, that the earliest thinking humans
(homo sapiens?) were in fact animistic - which seems like
polytheistic position to me.
and exactly on what evidence do you base your impression? on the
extensive scriptures these "earliest thinking humans" have left
behind?
the thing you have to realise is that until recently, atheism was a
persecuted world-view. this had several consequences.
(1) many atheists will not have publicised their conviction, thus
leaving few traces.
(2) consequently, most narratives about atheists are the products of
their enemies, the religions. now one of the important rhetorical
weapons religions use in their self-marketing is to describe their
doctrine in terms of being passed down from wiser elders, from time
immemorial. the pretence that our seniors were somehow wiser is
essentially a version of the "survival of the fittest" argumentative
strategy. it also plays on oedipal fears, by allusion to childhood, a
time when one is in fact surrounded by elders with a better grasp of
how the world turns.
To keep this strategy effective, it is vital for churches to claim
atheism as a modern phenomenon, a sign of the depravity of modern
times, rather than something as old or even older than religious
though. relatedly, our ancestors are generally being conceived of as
less cultured, closer to nature and if religion, rather than
atheism was their reaction to the problems religion tries to solve, it
would seem that the latter and not the former is somehow more
natural. but being natural is mostly assumed to be better, so you get
a pretty strong incentive for religious writers -- those who shaped
the common narratives about the genesis of religions and its
alternative -- to claim historical priority.
&catherine said:
I wasn't aware that there was really any atheism prior to
Christianity - though if someone can provide me with historical
examples to the contrary, I'll be happy to say that I'm wrong. And, of
course, I may have adopted a rather narrow definition of 'atheism'
here.
you'll find plenty in the ancient Greek world. the term "atheos" has
it's origins there, although it used to describe enemies of the
traditional local gods, which could include followers of other
faiths. (interestingly, early christians were sometimes considered
atheos, because the idea that a god would "come down" and be human was
such a violation of the dignity of what some religious greeks
considered intrinsic in the very notion of gods). if you look at the
pre-socrates, you'll notice a strong atheistic bent. anaximandros,
heraklit, emphedokles and others come to mind. in socratic times,
atheism becomes more problematic because there's presecution.