When and where did atheism first start ?

[vulcanlogician]

Or you could look at the Piraha people.

Interesting discussion from a missionary who tried to convert them
https://ffrf.org/publications/freethough...ithout-god

Wow. That was a really interesting and insightful essay. Thank you for sharing. As much as I enjoyed it, however, I'd like to point out that it was more a criticism of the Western ethos than rigorous commentary concerning religiosity of primitive peoples. Although it masqueraded as the latter from time to time, the criticisms along that vein were just not quite on point. Take this statement:

What are the lessons we can learn from the Pirahã? Well, for one thing, the Pirahã are happy without god. And that violates a lot of the predictions not only of religious folks but of anthropologists, who believe that god is an essential ingredient of all cultures. That’s false. There are cultures that get by just fine without any concept of god.

(I take issue with the bolded portion)

I appreciate the point that Everett is making here. It is an excellent point. But he seems to have mischaracterized anthropology while making it. If there are any anthropology buffs on the forum, feel free to correct me here, but as I understand it, anthropologists typically conclude that gods are a ubiquitous ingredient of all cultures--not an "essential" ingredient.

Also (again concerning what I see as a mischaracterization of anthropology) I take issue with these remarks:

We find anthropologists who, like Malinowski, one of the fathers of modern anthropology, kept two sorts of journals. He kept one journal about the cultural observations he was making and another journal about his personal reactions. He hated the people he was working with. He said terrible things about them in his journal. He kept them separate in his journals, but I doubt if he kept them separate successfully in his mind.

Who fucking cares? He kept his prejudices out of his work and that's the important (arguably crucial) consideration here. It doesn't matter to his work that the man had prejudices when expressing his personal opinions in his personal journal. The REAL question is, did these prejudices affect his conclusions? If you want to argue that they did, fine. Show me how his professional work was prejudiced. Don't tell me about the man's personal journals and say, "I doubt if he could have kept them separate in his mind." WHY do you doubt he could keep them separate in his mind? Some part of his mind compelled him to keep two separate journals. Maybe that was the part of his mind that was able to separate his prejudices from his personal observations. There is a little bit of mysticism going on here in Everett's thinking. And I don't like it.

The part of the article that most concerns our debate about atheism being "default" to human nature are his claims that Praha people have no creation myths. As interesting as that is, it doesn't quite relate to our thesis about "default atheism" (which is no fault of Everett's, but it is worth noting). Moreover, Everett's support for this claim are largely anecdotal. What's missing from his essay is a rigorous analysis of Piraha beliefs. This doesn't weigh down his main observations about Western/Christo-centric value and knowledge systems and their relevance to life in general (which are quite on point) but it does mean his claims about Piraha religiosity are flimsy and unfounded.

Plato was really a religious fascist, if you look carefully at what he wrote. Plato said that what we see here are just shadows of the ultimate reality that lies behind all of this. So when John started off his story, in chapter 1, telling the people that the Logos was God, the Greeks found that fairly easy to believe; but not in the Christian sense, in the sense that this was the ultimate reality. But then he gets down to verse 14, and he said, “And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” For the Greeks, that was really difficult to understand, to accept that idea at all. But it was the entrance of Christianity into Greek culture. And that was used by Don Richardson and Billy Graham and others as an example of a redemptive analogy. The Greek culture was prepared by Plato to accept the message of the gospel.

I don't know what the fuck this is. How is a quintessential anti-dogmatist a "religious fascist"? Guilt by association... perhaps drilled into Everett during his Christian indoctrination. Who knows? But he obviously hasn't looked carefully at what Plato wrote. You don't write quasi-unsupported statements about Plato in the first two sentences of a paragraph and then spend the rest of a paragraph rambling about the Gospel of John as if it is somehow relevant to Plato (who wrote his works four centuries earlier). As much as I agree with most of what Everett writes in the rest of the article, this entire paragraph is incoherent bullshit that says absolutely nothing.