Battling the Gods Quotes

“Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War is the culmination of the fifth-century tendency toward the exclusion of divine explanation. Not only does he refuse to admit non-naturalistic causality, but he cynically skewers any attempts on the part of the actors in his story to invoke the gods. Whatever his own personal beliefs were, the History can reasonably be claimed to be the earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“In a sense, scattered dots are exactly what one would expect to see in a pre-Enlightenment, pre-mechanized world. There were disbelievers in Greek antiquity just as there were everywhere, but there was no obvious role for mass-movement atheism in a culture where ensuring the stability of the state—which depended on the favor of the gods—was prized above all else. Atheism has prospered in the West since the eighteenth century because society has a role for it: in an advanced capitalist economy based on technological innovation, it has been necessary to claw intellectual and moral authority away from the clergy and reallocate it to the secular specialists in science and engineering. It is this social function that has allowed atheism to emerge as a movement composed of individual atheists.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“So the invention of atheism (in the negative sense of the word) in fifth-century BC Athens was rooted in a politically influenced desire to stigmatizee certain individuals. But perhaps there was more to it than that. What if what began as an insult was in time reappropriated as a badge of honor? This is a phenomenon well attested by modern social scientists: think of “queer,” “nigger,” or even “geek.” In such instances, the connotations of an initially negative term shift, and the label becomes associated with positive attributes.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“Diogenes’s central point is in effect the same as mine: that officially sanctioned religious records only tell you when worship seems to work and excise all evidence to the contrary.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“the post-Enlightenment West is seen as exceptional, completely unlike anything else that has preceded it and unlike anything elsewhere in the world. This is a dangerous misprision. To the religious, it can suggest that belief is somehow universal, essential to the human condition, and that creeping secularism is an unnatural state. Atheists,”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“From antiquity onward, Torah scrolls were treated as objects of veneration, and imagined to have (for example) health-giving properties. This Jewish idea that the book embodied the divinity of its sacred subject matter shaped the formation of the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. From antiquity onward, the idea of a material book as the ultimate source of truth has persisted. The Roman emperor Justinian passed a law in AD 530 requiring the presence of “holy scriptures” in court throughout proceedings; in the United Kingdom, as recently as 2013 the Magistrates’ Association reaffirmed the need for witnesses to swear on sacred texts.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“The invention of atheism was, both etymologically and historically, the creation of a negative. The Greek word atheos, which first appears in the fifth century BC, implies the absence (a-) of a god (theos). The older meaning implies someone who has lost the support of the gods, someone who is “godless” or “godforsaken” in the archaic English senses. It was often used in a kind of hyperbolic crescendo along with other negative adjectives, in phrases such as “atheos, unruly (anomos), and lawless (adikos).” This kind of phrasing suggests wild, barbaric behavior that is the very antithesis of proper, civilized Greek behavior”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“The idea of an essential difference between Greek culture and those of the Ancient Near East is not as widely accepted as it once was, and the idea that any such difference should be defined in terms of “freedom” looks uncomfortably close to Western propagandizing. Greek”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“But it is important to underline the point that the myth presents battles against the gods as crises of power, not manifestations of sinfulness. Salmoneus”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“Within the lifetime of the classical Athenian democracy, however, it came to acquire a second meaning, referring to someone whose beliefs or practices suggest a lack of commitment to belief in the gods. “I certainly do believe in gods—I am not an out-and-out atheos,” said Socrates at his trial in 399 BC (according to Plato). From the 430s onward we hear of atheos being used as a surname or nickname attached to various individuals. The pre-Socratic Hippo of Samos, active in Athens in the mid-430s, was said to be “surnamed the atheos”; so were Diagoras of Melos (mid-420s onward) and Theodorus of Cyrene (late fourth century). In other words, if you said “Hippo the atheist,” everyone knew who you meant.3”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“It was not just Critias, the author of the Sisyphus fragment, who reacted to the atheist revolution. Already, in the 420s, in the glow of the sophistic movement, tragedies and comedies began to explore the question of whether gods exist. The ideas canvassed by Protagoras, Democritus, and Prodicus reached a broad audience thanks to the theater.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“Was Anaxagoras an atheist? There is nothing anachronistic about this question. In the late 430s, he was put on trial for “impiety,” on the grounds that he denied the divinity of the heavenly bodies (which he undoubtedly did). This may have been the first time in history that an individual was prosecuted for heretical religious beliefs.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

“Oracles in Thucydides reveal not the gods’ plan for the world but humanity’s capacity to fool itself that the arbitrary processes of fortune are somehow predestined.”
― Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World