atheism Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Is Everyone Really Born an Atheist?

Those who have been reading my posts for a while may already know that I’ve been calling myself an agnostic since around mid-2019. In truth, though, I am functionally an atheist. The main reason why I’ve preferred to call myself an agnostic is because I don’t want to be affiliated with the sort of Richard Dawkins-style anti-theist activist atheists who acrimoniously denounce “religion” as inherently evil at every opportunity. I personally don’t think it is possible to assign any categorical moral value to “religion,” since “religion” is an imperfect western constructed category that can encompass various ideas and activities that may fall anywhere on a moral spectrum from “evil” to “good.” I have no particularly great interest in trying to convince people to stop believing in deities and I often find myself critiquing the claims and talking points of the anti-theist activist types.

One extremely common talking point among anti-theist activist atheists is that everyone is born an atheist. I think that this talking point is factually incorrect for two main reasons. The first is because it incorrectly conflates people who are not aware of the concept of a deity with people who have made a conscious choice not to believe in deities. The second reason is because it ignores certain innate tendencies in the human psyche that lead even very young children to assume the existence of supernatural personal agents, which may be very similar or functionally identical to deities. Moreover, I think that this talking point is useless at best and rhetorically counterproductive at worst, because it does nothing to support the argument that deities do not exist or the argument that atheists should be accepted by society.

Were the Sophists Really So Bad?

The word sophist comes from the Greek word σοφιστής (sophistḗs), which originally meant “one who is highly skilled or learned in his craft.” In the fifth century BCE, various professional teachers of public speaking began to emerge in the Greek world calling themselves σοφισταί (which is the plural form of σοφιστής).

These teachers would typically come to a city and court wealthy patrons, offering to teach them how to speak persuasively in exchange for a tuition fee. Sometimes they would teach other subjects as well, such as philosophy, music, poetry, or mathematics. They would stay in a given city long enough to teach any wealthy people who were willing to pay them for lessons and then move on to the next city to teach anyone who was willing to pay for lessons there.

The sophists have a bit of a bad reputation nowadays. The very word sophist itself has come to mean a person who uses rhetorical trickery and fallacious arguments to deceive people into believing falsehoods. In this post, I want to peel back the millennia of negative portrayals to explore who the sophists really were and what they really wrote (for most part in their own words). By the end of it, hopefully it will be clear what the real differences were between the sophists and the philosophers like Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BCE) and Xenophon (lived c. 430 – c. 354 BCE) who vilified them.

Unicorns in the Bible

You may have heard at some point that unicorns are mentioned nine times in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. This fact has been used by some skeptics to argue that the Bible is ridiculous, which has, in turn, led some fundamentalist Protestants to defend the Bible by making the incredible argument that unicorns may have actually existed at some point in the past.

If you look at the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, however, you won’t find anything at all about unicorns. Unicorns are only mentioned in the King James Version due to a roughly 2,200-year-old mistranslation originating in the Greek Septuagint. This mistranslation has been corrected in most modern translations of the Bible, including the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the New International Version (NIV).

Was Giordano Bruno Really a “Martyr for Science”?

There are two main historical figures that are often cited as supposed “martyrs for science.” The first is the Neoplatonic philosopher and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, who was murdered in March 415 AD by a mob of Christians who supported Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. The second is the Italian mystic Giordano Bruno, who was burned alive on 17 February 1600 by the Roman Inquisition.

Hypatia was a real scientist (or at least proto-scientist), but she was murdered for reasons entirely unrelated to her scientific work. As I discuss in this article I published in August 2018, all the surviving contemporary sources indicate that Hypatia was murdered due to her involvement in a bitter political feud between Orestes, the Christian Roman governor of Egypt, and Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria. Hypatia was one of Orestes’s major allies. Her murder was basically a political assassination.

Giordano Bruno, on the other hand, was not a scientist at all and he was executed for reasons entirely unrelated to science. Ironically, by insisting on calling him a “martyr for science,” Bruno’s admirers are kind of shooting themselves in the foot by destroying their own credibility.

No, Public Universities Aren’t Dominated by Evil Atheist Professors Seeking to Destroy Students’ Faith

The idea that evil, liberal, atheist professors are forcing their students to renounce their faith is an extremely longstanding and pervasive fear among conservative evangelical Christians here in the United States. Right-wing evangelicals have been blaming universities and their supposedly evil, liberal, atheist professors for increasing secularization in society since at least the late nineteenth century.

The trope of the atheist professor forcing his students to renounce God can be found in political speeches, cartoons, internet memes, and even films. Despite the longstanding prevalence of this idea, however, it is, for the most part, entirely unsupported by evidence.

What Evidence Is There for Atheism in Ancient Greece?

A frequent question I have encountered is the question of whether there were atheists in ancient Greece. This is a question that is surprisingly difficult to answer and I think the most appropriate answer is something along the lines of “sort of, but not exactly.” Although it is certainly possible that there were people in ancient Greece who rejected the existence of all deities, the historical evidence for the existence of such individuals is extremely limited to say the very least.

We have solid evidence for the existence of people in ancient Greece who criticized certain aspects of traditional Greek religion and we even have solid evidence for the existence of people in ancient Greece who might be termed “agnostics,” but we have no clear, unambiguous, contemporary historical evidence for the existence of people in ancient Greece who outright denied the existence of all deities altogether.