(June 24, 2019 at 7:06 pm)Belaqua Wrote: Like language. Or math. Or how to behave in a group.
No it's not like language or math because atheism is free thinking and imposing religion on a child is transforming that child from a natural question-poser to a socialized question-rejecter. It is attack on human mind and its capacity to ask and know altogether.
Finding evidence of religious unbelief in the ancient world isn't easy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Truth is almost all writings by ancient atheists were destroyed by religious people, but they obviously were very powerful that even the Bible couldn't ignore them, like in Psalm 14:1: The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' The psalmist doesn't sugar-coat his opinion of these unbelievers: They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good.
For instance in Islam there was Abu al-Hasan Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Ishaq al-Rawandi who was a former Islamic theologian himself. He anticipated every argument of the theologians with a devastating counterargument. He was known as someone who called Muhammad a liar, and he also said the miracles of Moses and Jesus were nothing more than "fraudulent tricks." That Allah acts like "a wrathful, murderous enemy," and that he probably couldn’t even add two and four. The Quran itself he described as "the speech of an unwise being" that contains "contradictions, errors and absurdities."
It's no surprise then that al-Rawandi’s written works — including his most famous, The Book of the Emerald — have vanished, except for a few fragments quoted by his critics. And his impact was long-lasting; more than 200 years after his death, Muslim theologian al-Shirazi was still spilling gallons of ink arguing against al-Rawandi’s suggestion that truth can be discovered through human reason without the need for prophecy or revelation.
Or take 3rd century author Porphyrios and his tract Against the Christians. I mean this tract so totally refuted Christian mythology that the Christian censors destroyed even the pathetic attempts of forty Christian apologists to rebut it.
Or in China there was Xun Zi, among others, who wrote thinks like Pray all you want — heaven can’t hear you. It’s not going to stop the winter because you are cold, and it’s not going to make the Earth smaller because you don’t want to walk so far. You pray for rain and it rains, but your prayer has nothing to do with it. Sometimes you don’t pray for rain and it rains anyway. What do you say then? If you act wisely, good things tend to happen. Act like a fool and bad things tend to happen. Don’t thank or curse heaven — it’s just the natural result of your own actions. If you want to have a better life, educate yourself and think carefully about the consequences of your actions.
