When and where did atheism first start ?

[Foxaèr]

Hello Friends,

Can anyone tell me from where did atheism start and when did it start ?

Thanks

Atheism started with the first man comprehending that religious concepts are merely fictional.

[Angrboda]

Atheism started when Belaqua defined it for everyone.

[Foxaèr]

Is it time for Daddy Fierce to put Baby Bel in his place?

[Cecelia]

March 10th, 79,652 B.C. Invented by Ogg, who did not believe in the Sun God. Biff, the sun priest, beat him in the head with a rock shortly afterwards in what is known as the world's first hate crime. Scientists have found that Ogg produced higher levels of brain activity than his fellow early humans, and believe that had he survived -- the human race would have instead evolved into a hyper intelligent race that could have made it to the moon within 500 years. Sadly Ogg had no offspring, while Biff had plenty. Mostly because he had the biggest rock. Which was pretty ironic, if you catch my meaning.

[Brian37]

Hello Friends,

Can anyone tell me from where did atheism start and when did it start ?

Thanks

Bad question.

Skepticism in our species has always existed. There was no single magic moment where suddenly large masses decided to question.

In antiquity humans worldwide did not have the current modern knowledge we do now. Our species progress was slow, and collective, but unfortunately with lots of powers resisting change.

[Cod]

Hello Friends,

Can anyone tell me from where did atheism start and when did it start ?

Thanks

The default position of all the species on this earth is atheism. Can anyone tell me when the first theist came along and ruined all of that?

[EgoDeath]

Atheism started with the first man comprehending that religious concepts are merely fictional.

Surely atheism existed far before organized religion ever did. Even far before "religious concepts."

Atheism started when Belaqua defined it for everyone.  

Belaqua seems to know how everything works. Shit, what do we even use the internet for? We should all just have him on speed dial.

[Belacqua]

There were probably early humans witnessing the first inventions of gods that were like "WTF?" They were probably strictly empiricists.

 I suspect you're half joking here, but you do bring up some solid questions. 

There's no way to know, but we can make some educated guesses about how "the first inventions of the gods" came about. I don't think it's likely it looked like the cartoon version that's easiest to imagine. Here's Ogg hearing the thunder, and somebody asks him, in English, "what causes that, Ogg?" and he says, "It must be a god." And some people believe him and some don't. That scenario contains so many modern concepts that early humans couldn't even think it.

Granted, all animals are empiricists at some level. My cats learn where not to sit, through experience. Even the earliest humans would know not to hit their thumbs. They might well connect weather conditions with more effective hunting, and things like that. And since they live very much in the concrete world of cause and effect, they are likely to assume that effects for which they don't know the cause in fact have one, somewhere. 

It's also likely that early humans would attribute more consciousness to objects than we do. They might assume that animals have desires similar to humans, that the weather has some sense of what it wants, that certain plants or landscape features need to be kept happy. This is still the case in animist groups. So it's not like some wise guy invented a god one day in order to trick people. Human beings think through symbols and metaphors, when they think of anything more than the most concrete relations, so it seems to me a kind of default state for people to have notions of non-human consciousnesses, emotions not located inside people, powers that it helps us to satisfy. 

If people want to claim that objects without the capacity for conceptual thought are atheists, that's fine with me. Dirt is atheist. The space inside an empty box is atheist. But human beings who have begun to conceptualize the world and make an effort to improve their lives within it will probably come up with vague god-like concepts from pretty early on. Granted, from those fuzzy ideas to the Christian Trinity is a huge jump and maybe not a good one. But in terms of thinking about the world in terms of non-human spirits, that seems likely to be pretty much the default to me.

[Cod]

Yeah, the default for human beings is definitely thinking about the world in terms of non-human spirits..... That is why theism is not a learned behaviour, we're all definitely born with theistic tendencies, and no faith is required.

Just because our ancestors were too sodding thick to work out what thunder was, doesn't mean that woo is hard wired into us.

[Belacqua]

Yeah, the default for human beings is definitely thinking about the world in terms of non-human spirits..... 

I think I was clear that I wasn't talking about modern humans. I think the concepts were still fuzzy for very early humans, and the ideas of what was alive, and what had emotions, and what needed to be cooperated with, was nowhere near what it is for us on this forum. 

That is why theism is not a learned behaviour, we're all definitely born with theistic tendencies, and no faith is required.

I think we have built in desires to explain how the world works. Maybe it works like a language -- the desire and the basic structure is built in, but the specifics are learned from whatever society the child finds herself in. In a religious society, she learns religion as the explanation. In a logic-only society, she learns logic as the explanation. 

If we take the term "faith" in its simplest sense, to mean "I'm pretty sure it's true,"  then a child raised in a logical household will have faith in logic. 

Just because our ancestors were too sodding thick to work out what thunder was, doesn't mean that woo is hard wired into us.

That particular woo isn't hardwired into us. The general desire to find explanations probably is. Some explanations will be a lot better than others.