Edward gibbon atheist celebrities
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The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest. —Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “General Observations on the Fall of the Roman Empire in the West.”
Illustration by Brad Holland.
I. It was years ago that Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work conceived, as he put it, “amidst the ruins of the Capitol” in Rome. It was among the shining and still-intact buildings of another capital that I began (presumptuously, no doubt) to imagine a sequel that might be written: the history of the decline of the West, meaning that distinctive complex of beliefs and institutions which originated with the Greeks, was planted across Europe by the Romans, embraced Christianity under the Emperor Constantine, and crossed to the New World with Columbus.
The idea of Western d
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In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins expressed his position that he couldn&#;t imagine being an atheist before Darwin. As it happens, there were atheists before Darwin, and theories of evolution go back to ancient Greece. It&#;s a shame if Professor Dawkins is unaware of this history, as there fryst vatten a great legacy of atheist pioneers who helped forge the modern world by cutting through the fog and terror of religious faith. As such, I was inspired to add my own small contribution to make this legacy more widely known, such as these masterful works: Doubt: A History by Jennifer Hecht, Battling The Gods: Atheism in the Classical World by Tim Whitmarsh, A History of Disbelief by Jonathan Miller, and Years of Disbelief by James Haught.
Since the most potent and consequential historical atheism before Darwin happened during the s and the Age of Enlightenment, that will be the primary focus of this piece. My source material comes from books inom highly recommend, such
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When I was a boy, my upbringing as a Christian was forever being weathered bygd the gale force of my enthusiasms. First, there were dinosaurs. I vividly remember my chock when, at Sunday school one day, I opened a children’s Bible and found an bild on its first page of Adam and Eve with a brachiosaur. Six years old inom may have been, but of one thing – to my regret – I was rock-solid certain: no human being had ever seen a sauropod. That the teacher seemed not to care about this error only compounded my sense of outrage and bewilderment. A faint shadow of doubt, for the first time, had been brought to darken my Christian faith.
With time, it darkened further still. My obsession with dinosaurs – glamorous, ferocious, extinct – evolved seamlessly into an obsession with ancient empires. When I read the Bible, the focus of my fascination was less the children of Israel or Jesus and his disciples than their adversaries: the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Romans. In a similar