Modern Atheism Isn’t Actually All That New
The word atheos is Greek, and seems to have first been used in our sense in the fifth century BCE
time.com
This post is in partnership with the History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN.
Whenever anyone speaks of “new atheists,” my stomach churns. It’s hard not to think of a clique of educated white men of a certain age congratulating themselves on their intellectual superiority over the benighted fools around them. The “newness” of these atheists neatly captures the Whiggish conception of history that Richard Dawkins in particular has espoused, imagined in terms of progress out of a primitive, superstitious past towards a glisteningly rational future. You don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to expose the western-centredness of this kind of discourse.
The “new atheism” shtick has also been embraced by its opponents. For many on the religious side of the fence, atheism is not a triumph of the modern West but a symptom of its pathological decadence, its slide from pious observance into secular, mechanized, capitalized doubt. In other words, it suits both sides to promote the fiction that atheism is something invented in recent times by the white West.
Atheism is certainly not limited to the white West – as the murder of four Bangladeshi bloggers in 2015 has brutally reminded us. Of course, some will see this as another sign (whether benign or diabolical) of the spread of western influence throughout our interconnected world. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. What campaigners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali have emphasised is that the dissidents have been there all along; web-based communication has simply given them new opportunities for expression and wider audiences.
Nor is atheism limited to modernity. I am often reminded, when I read of “new” atheism, of the words of the Athenian stranger in Plato’s final work,The Laws. Plato was deeply hostile to atheism, and presents his Athenian legislating against those who disbelieve in gods, in their ability to affect our world, or in the efficacy of religious institutions. Turning to address an imaginary young atheist, he expostulates that “You and your friends are not the first to have held this view about the gods! There are always those who suffer from this illness, in greater or lesser numbers.” Atheism is not of course an “illness,” but I do think that Plato was basically right, in that across all cultures and all time there have been those – in greater or lesser numbers – who have disbelieved in gods.... |
