@lack New thread. This one isn’t a question of why you are an atheist - different question. Why has atheism never (really) been a thing until recent history? Surely there were philosophical and scientific geniuses in prehistoric civilization and in the ancient world - they discovered fire, invented writing, invented the wheel, discovered how to cultivate plants and domesticated beasts of burden. They did this while performing excruciating manual labor, under constant privation (by modern …
@b_chocolatey those are some big claims that i'm not sure i believe.
but even assuming every person believed in the same super natural being (which they don't), it feels to me like the likelier explanation is that early man was scientifically unsophisticated and tried to explain the world around him in terms he was familiar with. also its generally not a good idea to go against the tribe when you depend on them for survival, especially if "god" has decided the punishment for apostasy is death.
@wagesj45 1. The very point I was trying to make earlier was that the sharpest #scientific minds of the current age are absolutely pitiful compared to their 25000 BCE equivalent. Surely somebody would have “discovered” #atheism relatively early on, but belief in the paranormal and supernatural has been the norm among the #literate classes since the invention of #writing.
