@reasoning logic,
Those who prate about the entry of the word atheist into English are advancing what i think of as the argument from the dictionary. Apparently, they attempt to suggest that atheism did not exist until Noah Webster wrote it down in his dictionary (or whomever they credit with the dirty deed). Ancient Greece, at least, gives the lie to that. It is reminiscent of Shaw's
St. Joan in which the inquisitor objects to Joan's voices because they spoke to her in French. When asked what language they ought to have spoken, he answers, as though surprised, "English, of course!"
Socrates didn't write anything down, so all we know about him comes from Plato and Xenophon. In fact, the "apology" by Plato wasn't even written down by him, but by Xenophon. Based on the Platonic apology, Socrates could have been described as an agnostic. Whether he was also an atheist can't really be known. His detractors, castigating him from a variety of points of view, accused him of being an atheist, and of not being an atheist (that being a bad thing in some people's eyes).
Neither was Plato an atheist, but despite heavy borrowings from Plato by Origen and Augustine of Hippo, his view of theism cannot easily be squared with christian theism. He didn't believe in a creator god, only a demiurge, which shaped the material world from imperfect materials. He also spoke and wrote about "the gods," seeing them natural phenomena, such as Apollo, with their religious character actually being false, in that they were not personalities but simply avatars of natural forces--in this view, Apollo is the avatar of the sun, and the benefits it confers on the earth.
It seems to escape those who advance the idiotic argument from the dictionary, that Socrates could not have been accused of being an atheist, or, alternatively by those who considered that a good thing, not being an atheist, unless the concept existed 2500 years ago. Neither Plato nor Pythagoras were supporters of the "established" religion of the Greeks, and it is not clear that those religious myths any longer had any force in Greek society. Pythagoras was a very religious person, in that he saw the divine and the mathematical as inseparable, but he believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls, which people of little education and no imagination would call "reincarnation." Pythagoras was not known to have commented on cosmogony (the origin of the cosmos) nor on source of souls.
Seneca the Younger, who, coincidentally, was born at about the same time as the putative Jesus was alleged to have been born, wrote, nearly 2000 years ago:
Quote:Religion--regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
When Seneca was growing up, Octavian, called Caesar Augustus, was emperor. When Augustus died, his successor, Tiberius, had him declared divine, and the worship of Augustus was added to the state religion. Everyone in the Roman empire was required to at least pay lip service ot the state religion. You could practice any religion you pleased, but once a year, you had to go to the market, buy a chicken, and take it to the civic temple for the priests to slaughter it, and read the auguries of its entrails. The priests would at least have chicken soup for supper, and on a good day, they could all have roast chicken.
The concept of the atheist is at last thousands of years old, not matter what drivel anyone may allege about when the word entered the English language.
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It is possible for someone to be a theist and an agnostic, just as it is for someone to be an atheist and an agnostic. The agnostic theist says, as several members here have done over the years: "I don't know if there is a god, but i believe that there is." The agnostic atheist, of course, says: "I don't know if there is a god, but i
don't believe that there is." These issues are very, very old, and, as i've pointed out, go back at least thousands of years. I suspect when the first shaman stepped up and started ranting about the sun god, or the mother earth goddess, someone in the back of the crowd shouted out "Bullshit!"
