(April 27, 2019 at 2:16 am)Draconic Aiur Wrote: Anything before the late 1900's = religious fanatics run you over.
This was surely true in some times and places.
It's interesting, though, to look at how our current freedom has roots and a contingent history. Especially in English-speaking countries, this is all pretty well documented, I think.
For example, 18th century Britain was surprisingly free religiously. The Church of England was still officially the boss, but you can read about all kinds of antinomian and small-scale sects, like Muggletonians. Swedenborg's ideas were still current. These are not atheistic groups, but they were wildly out of the mainstream, and were never in danger of oppression by religious fanatics.
Shelley was kicked out of university for declaring himself an atheist. If that's oppression I guess it's oppression. But he went out of his way to trumpet his views, and it's well known that many other atheists in his time got along just fine by not poking the officials in the eye. (My personal opinion was that he shouldn't have been kicked out.)
It's particularly interesting to look at the nascent Romantic movement and the intellectuals in London. Mary Godwin, William Godwin, William Blake, Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestly, etc. Some were religious (Priestly was a minister and also discovered oxygen) and some were atheists (Paine famously so). They all got along fine. Blake (a very heretical Christian) is credited with saving Paine's life by advising him to flee to France -- not for religious reasons, but because the king was touchy about revolutions elsewhere and was cracking down on political dissent.
This circle continued and enlarged. From the end of the 19th century until today, it was entirely common for people around Cambridge, Oxford, and Bloomsbury circles to be open about their atheism and adamant in their writing. I've been on an autobiography kick lately, and have read the memoirs of William Empson (critic and poet), Kathleen Raine (first a biologist, then a scholar of literature), and E.R. Dodds (one of the century's great Greek scholars). All were atheists while at school, and the two men stayed so all their lives. The influence of Bertrand Russell and particularly A.J. Ayer was dominant in British intellectual circles from surprisingly early.
So to say "late 1900s" needs quite a bit of qualification, I'd say.
