Who 'invented' atheism?

Atheism was invented by God when he couldn't be bothered "proving" himself towards the doubters. Perhaps an avowed atheist would still not believe in God, even when faced with Him. "Shut up! Don't get round me by existing!" might be something an avowed atheist might say.

That said, I find it difficult to believe in a God that wants to be praised all the time.

I thoroughly recommend you read The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas if you wish to understand the development of Western atheism.

www.amazon.com...

From Publishers Weekly
Tarnas charts the development of Western thought from the ancient Greeks, throwing a sharp light on ideas central to the modern outlook.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher
"No other such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey. Its scholarship is impeccable....For its length it is the best intellectual history of the West I have ever seen." --Huston Smith, Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley

Atheism as we know it today stems largely from the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment periods when scientists and philosophers (e.g., Descartes, Bacon, Galeleo, Copernicus, Newton, Voltaire, Locke, Feuerbach, Marx, Spencer, Huxley, Nietzsche, Kant, Hegel, etc) discovered reliable laws and principles for understanding how the world works. The world became increasingly demystified and intelligible. And as more and more everyday people became aware of the developments in science and philosophy of the 15th-18th century, they started to lose their sense of reliance on God:

Christianity no longer seemed to be the driving force of the human enterprise. For the robust civilization of the West at the high noon of modernity, it was science and reason, not religion and belief, which propelled that progress. Man's will, not God's, was the acknowledged source of the world's betterment and humanity's advancing liberation.

Tarnas, R. (1991) The Passion of the Western Mind, Pg. 323

Humans stopped believing of God when they started believing in themselves. Good or bad, wise or foolish, this is basically what generated atheism.

Atheism is not an invention, it's just not believing in gods. You say that atheists will feel helpless in a time of need, really? Who is going to help you in a time of need? You think that by believing in a god will grant you some kind of divine protection. Name one instance where a god has helped someone in a time of need, not even one? You say you don't believe in a god but that you believe in a higher power which basically is a god, it's laughable.

reply to post by DraconianKing


Someone gave it a name.

That makes it an invention, or at the least a sub-intellectual ideology.

Otherwise, i imagine most of the people who are atheists now would probably be agnostic.

[edit on 6-7-2008 by Anti-Tyrant]

Religion developed as a byproduct of the development of human civilization. It served as both a means to explain the unknown and a tool to control (the high priests ruled by mandate of the gods, rule by divine edict, etc.). So you could say that atheism is the natural state of the human mind in that before someone believes in a particular religion (or any belief system really), they don't believe in it. You aren't born with your beliefs already in place.

To say that atheism was 'invented' as a means of governmental control is absurd. As long as someone has said 'Well that was caused by a god', someone else has said, 'No it wasn't, that god doesn't exist'.

reply to post by DraconianKing


I'm not saying everybody needs 'help' in a 'time of need', what I'm saying is most people are too bloody bone idle to do anything about it themselves and would prefer to have people who supposedly hold more 'power' sort it out for them.

At one time it would have been priests and praying etcetc for the world. But good little sheeple who put their 'faith' (not necessarily in the religious sense) in the government will pretty much bend over and do whatever they're told, which funnily enough, seems to be going on everywhere right now.
Problem is, in 'democracy' the majority rules, and it just so happens that the majority of people these days are happy enough to do whatever, so long as they can drive home in their nice car and watch tv all night.
Personally, I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and watched TV.