@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 2. the punishment for apostasy was also death in seventeenth-century #France, and twentieth century #China. Why was there never an #atheistic tribe before that time? Surely they, too, would have punished apostasy with death.
