atheism Quick reference
The Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World
... The Greek for atheism is ‘not to recognize the gods’ or ‘deny that the gods exist’ or, later, ‘to remove the gods’. The Greek word atheos can be applied to atheism (e.g. in Plato's Apology ), but in the earliest instances it means ‘impious, vicious’ or ‘hated, abandoned by the gods’, and these senses persist along with the other. Christians and pagans were to swap charges of atheism, by which they meant ‘impious views about the divine’. The gods of popular polytheism were rejected or drastically reinterpreted by all philosophers from the 6th cent. ...
atheism Reference library
Robert Christopher Towneley Parker
The Oxford Classical Dictionary (4 ed.)
... , The Greek for atheism is ‘not to recognize (νομίζειν) the gods’ or ‘deny that the gods exist’ or, later, ‘to remove (ἀναιρεῖν) the gods’. (The old doctrine that θεοὺς νομίζειν never means to ‘believe in’ but always to ‘pay cult to’ the gods is wrong; but it is true that borderline cases exist.) The Greek word ἄθεος can be applied to atheism (Pl. Ap. 26c), but in the earliest instances it means ‘impious, vicious’ or ‘hated, abandoned by the gods’, and these senses persist along with the other; so too with ἀθεότης. Thus Christians and pagans were to...
Atheism Reference library
Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment
...Generation ; and Toland, John .] Berman, David . History of Atheism in Britain from Hobbes to Russell . London, 1988. A book that finds atheism where the author of this article often would not, and so a book that provides an important alternative view of the problem of the history of atheism. Buckley, Michael J. , S. J. At the Origins of Modern Atheism . New Haven, Conn., 1987. A rich and deep theological and philosophical contextualization of the origins of Enlightenment (and other) atheism. Deprun, Jean , Roland Desné , and Albert Soboul . Jean...
atheism Reference library
Edward Royle
The Oxford Companion to British History (2 ed.)
...Necessity of Atheism’. In Britain the best-known atheist, Thomas Paine ( 1737–1809 ), was in fact a deist whose Age of Reason was written to counter the progress of French atheism. As loyalist propaganda in the 1790s was directed against those radical ideas in religion and politics associated with the French Revolution, atheism became identified with lower-class subversion, though only a few radicals, such as William Godwin ( 1756–1836 ) and Jeremy Bentham ( 1748–1832 ), were actually atheists. In the 19th cent., materialistic atheism was taken up in...
Atheism Reference library
Martin E. Marty
The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment
...great.” He had no names to name. Positively, the almost invisible presence of atheism made it possible for more moderate and public doctrines like those of deism to escape the worst criticism. Negatively, the attacks on it left a legacy of abhorrence of atheism, which for the next two centuries has been exploitable by the enforcers of orthodoxy in church and state. Organizations devoted to propagating atheism have been few and small, but what is sometimes called “practical atheism,” in which citizens act the same way whether or not God exists has found a home...
Atheism Reference library
Thoralf KLEIN
Berkshire Encyclopedia of China
...the term, Confucianism, which came under fire for its association with the official cult of the state. Because these intellectuals formed the backbone of revolutionary movements and of the emerging political parties, atheism played an important role in the political transformation of China. Atheism during the Republican Period Chinese atheism was first and foremost directed against religion’s most “superstitious” form: folk, or popular, religion, which also includes certain elements of Buddhism and Daoism. The republican revolution of 1911–1912 witnessed...
Atheism Reference library
Nathalie Caron
The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History
... a before the Greek theos , a position described as “negative atheism” in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism , edited by Michael Martin, 2007 ) and those who believe that there is no God or gods (“positive atheism”). As a consequence of globalization, urbanization, secularization, and a number of sociodemographic developments, including immigration, religious pluralism, and the rise of political and religious conservatisms, however, usage and attitudes toward atheism are changing in the early twenty-first century. The phrase “closeted atheist” has...
Atheism and Agnosticism Reference library
Stephen Wagley
The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World
... and Agnosticism . Atheism in the modern world has both theoretical and practical manifestations, and developed mainly in reaction to Christian theology. The word has meant different things at different times: bad behavior, scoffing at holy things, irreligion, wrong religion (as in the controversies among Christians that followed the Reformation), or a well-thought-out rejection of God and religion. In the West, atheism is usually a rejection of God as understood in Christianity. Western European societies traditionally feared and hated “atheism” and...
Natural Philosophy (Science) Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
... 1795 . However, Coleridge began to think that Newton's followers encouraged a mechanical philosophy that explained too much by secondary causes, leaving God as an indolent First Cause. He concluded that the concept of lifeless matter separated from God was a large step towards atheism; and secondly, that Priestley's alternative of active matter was a form of pantheism. Thus after about 1800 Coleridge sought a natural philosophy that escaped the atomistic and mechanical conceptions of the natural world. This search took him into German Naturphilosophie and...
Religion Reference library
An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age
...frank unbelief made their way quietly in higher intellectual circles. The most eminent eighteenth-century instance was the highly influential—and much controverted—philosopher David *Hume , but such views survived the French Revolution to surface in the scepticism or outright atheism of philosophers like Jeremy *Bentham and James *Mill , or of poets like Lord *Byron and Percy *Shelley . Anti-clerical views also made considerable headway in an awakening popular opinion, drawing on old resentments of clerical presumption and on a new awareness of abuses...
Richard Carlile
Annie Besant
Clandestine Literature
Jean Meslier
Natural Religion
Jacques-André Naigeon
Thomas Harriot
Charles Bradlaugh
deism
