The Bible is the claim, not the evidence

[Sword of Christ]

Atheism has always been around since the very first claims about gods were made, long before Yahweh was a twinkle in Abraham's eyes.

It goes back to the around the 17th century though at a push you can find a philosophy resembling it in the classical world in the first couple of centuries BC though they still technically believed in the gods. Just as something of interest though the ancient Jews initially didn't really believe in an afterlife, nothing particularly nice anyway you went into the ground that's where you stayed. So God was very much focused here in this life.

The Christians themselves were called "atheists" by their pagan critics.

It's because what they believed in didn't really resemble the proper gods people had been accustomed to.

Christianity was, AFAIK, the first religion ever to claim that not only was their god superior to all the others, that it was the only one up there and everyone else was just praying to idols and imaginary beings.

Well does this look like the kind of being the human mind would invent?



He looks a bit like human to me, the God of the Bible looks nothing like that he looks like nothing at all. You have the invented idols that resemble man and you have the real deal which is in order of magnitude different.

Before Christianity, it was common for people to dabble with different gods and different religions depending on their needs at the time.

People still do that's what Wicca and New Age beliefs and all that business is about.

One could pray to this god for good crops and another god for fertility.

When Anglo Saxon farmers asked who would look after their crops if the gods weren't real they told they had to look after them themselves.

When two cultures went to war, they imagined their gods also fighting up in the heavens. Even those devoted to a particular religion, such as the ancient Jews, didn't deny the existence of the other gods, only that the other gods were weaker. The OT is filled with examples.

In the early part of the Bible the assumption was that the gods of other nations did exist but were trivial things and latter they are depicted as being nothing but idols of carved wood and stone that were capable of doing nothing at all.