@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 …

@lack Atheism didn’t really become a thing at the civilizational and cultural level until the anti-clericalism of the French Revolution and the Cult of Reason. Even then, the Cult of Reason went out of fashion quickly, and they brought in a Cult of the Supreme Being (basically, Enlightenment Deism, Watchmaker creationism without any messiah or prophets) as I understand it.

@b_chocolatey @lack
Seems like the whole push for atheism has been nothing more than a social engineering psyop to install the new faith if sciencism and consumerism

At the top of the power structure there are few (possibly no) atheists. They may "worship" the light of knowledge (apex of modern science technology etc), deities, or one god. But they "worship" something.

But if someone doesn't bow at some alter or another, the gubmint will gladly fill that "higher power" gap

@MtnStateNomad @lack the woke religion likes to mobilize sympathetic churches leaders and religious organizations towards their preferred in-group whenever possible. They gain nothing by making a principled, internally consistent, unpopular argument for no-god-because-dinosaurs. The Current Thing has already moved on

@b_chocolatey @MtnStateNomad could it be as simple as the fact that ideas, like technology, take time to develop?

Why wasn't the transistor invented in the 1400s? Because the things that had to be before it hadn't happened yet.

@lack @MtnStateNomad Materialism isn’t actually an extremely difficult concept to figure out! There was an obscure Greek philosopher back in the day who said that the gods were imaginary and that the wind and rain are random events. Why didn’t it catch on? Why did the Greek pantheon have such staying power - and evolve into the Roman pantheon, until the time of Theodosius?