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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (266420)	6/24/2002 2:08:49 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

In the Western intellectual world, nonbelief in the existence of God is a widespread phenomenon with a long and distinguished history. Philosophers of the ancient world such as Lucretius were nonbelievers. Even in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) there were currents of thought that questioned theist assumptions, including skepticism, the doctrine that true knowledge is impossible, and naturalism, the belief that only natural forces control the world. Several leading thinkers of the Enlightenment (1700-1789) were professed atheists, including Danish writer Baron Holbach and French encyclopedist Denis Diderot. Expressions of nonbelief also are found in classics of Western literature, including the writings of English poets Percy Shelley and Lord Byron; English novelist Thomas Hardy; French philosophers Voltaire and Jean-Paul Sartre; Russian author Ivan Turgenev; and American writers Mark Twain and Upton Sinclair. In the 19th century the most articulate and best-known atheists and critics of religion were German philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche. British philosopher Bertrand Russell, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, and Sartre are among the 20th century's most influential atheists. "Atheism," Microsoft® Encarta® Encyclopedia 2000. © 1993-1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

To: goldworldnet who wrote (266420)	6/24/2002 2:15:03 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The main stimulus for the Enlightenment was the scientific discoveries of natural laws. For example, Galileo recognized the movement of planets, moons, and stars, and Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity. The deist philosophy was dealt a major blow when Einstein showed that Newton's "laws" were not fully correct. The philosophy pretty much died out after the discovery by Godel that these laws and rules could not completely describe themselves much less God. miskatonic.org