Comments on Atheism

Atheism and atheist are words that seem to have been created from ancient Greek language but they are not Greek; Greeks would refer to atheos and atheotes; which closely correspond to the English words ungodly and ungodliness. "In exactly the same way as ungodly, atheos was used as an expression of severe censure and moral condemnation; this use is an old one, and the oldest that can be traced. Not till later do we find it employed to denote a certain philosophical creed; we even meet with philosophers bearing atheos as a regular surname. We know very little
of the men in question; but it can hardly be doubted that atheos, as applied to them, implied not only a denial of the gods of popular belief, but a denial of gods in the widest sense of the word, or Atheism as it is nowadays understood. In this case the word is more particularly a philosophical term. But it was used in a similar sense also in popular language, and corresponds then closely to the English “denier of God,” denoting a person who denies the gods of his people and State. From the popular point of view the interest, of course, centered in those only, not in the exponents of philosophical theology. Thus we find the word employed both of theoretical denial of the gods (atheism in our sense) and of practical denial of the gods, as in the case of the adherents of monotheism, Jews and Christians."

During the period of philosophic enlightenment that swept throughout Europe in the beginning of the 18th century. At that time an individual was considered to be an an atheist if the individual did not accept or believe in the existence of a Being or Beings that is superior to nature, which includes all of the human beings that ever lived. There can be no God other than nature and humankind is considered a part of that nature.

Pre-enlightenment ideas on atheism spoke to the existence of force that had existed for all time and is acted upon by something referred to as matter that takes shape and substance without the intended effect caused by intelligent designing in the natural world.

By the twentieth century atheism had come to unilaterally deny the very idea of God or any other derivation of a supernatural being.

"Nowadays the term is taken to designate the attitude which denies every idea of God. Even antiquity sometimes referred to atheism in this sense; but an inquiry dealing with the history of religion could not start from a definition of that kind. It would have to keep in view, not the philosophical notion of God, but the conceptions of the gods as they appear in the religion of antiquity. Herein lies atheism in the Pagan terms of an earth based religion of antiquity as the point of view which denies the existence of the ancient gods."

Thus, by the first decades of the 1920s "atheism was understood to be the positive denial of either [true] religion or God." And by the end of the twentieth century "To be an atheist in the broad sense is to deny the existence of any sort of divine being or divine reality. To be an atheist in the narrow sense is to deny that there exists a divine being that is all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good.

Atheism has also come to be understood as something that is "culturally bounded, and that atheism is a crime against the status quo. This is the sense in which Socrates, who explicitly ascribed his views to the influence of “the God”, was regarded as an atheist by the Athenians, because he failed to support the religion of the State. Similar aspersions were cast by the Romans on the Jews and early Christians, who likewise failed to follow the state religion, and were charged with “atheism.”