There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.
Ruth Hurmence Green, atheist author[1]
In the spring of 415, Egyptian philosopher Hypatia discouraged a local governor from becoming a Christian. A furious Christian mob retaliated by literally ripping Hypatia’s body apart.[2]
That was just a taste of what would happen to anyone who opposed Christianity.
You can say a lot of things about the Christian regimes that spread after the Roman empire collapsed in the fall of 476, but you have to give them credit for consistency. Century after century, they repressed any kind of open, public freethinking. As late as February 17, 1600, Catholic Church officials tied Italian astronomer-priest Giordano Bruno to a stake and burned him alive -- apparently just for denying the church’s Bible-based claim that the sun orbits the Earth.[3] (Thirty-three years later, they arrested Galileo for saying the same thing but didn’t burn him.) Between Hypatia and Bruno, the number of influential heretics and doubters in the wide and growing Christian world was roughly zero.
Other parts of the planet don’t seem to have produced many prominent dissenters, either.
• Starting in the early 600s, the prophet Muhammad and his followers spread Islam throughout the Middle East and surrounding regions -- and opposed atheism as passionately as the Christians.
• Most of Asia doesn’t seem to have grown many scandalous atheist leaders or infamous atheist books, possibly because the question of whether or not gods existed wasn’t as big a deal there as it was in Europe or the Middle East. (See Chapter Four, if you haven’t already, for Asian beliefs that have an atheist or agnostic stripe.)
• And if any atheists became influential in North America, South America or Africa before the 1700s, no one’s found much evidence of them.
But you can’t keep a good heresy down forever.
[1] Annie Laurie Gaylor, editor, Women Without Superstition: No Gods -- No Masters, Madison, Wisconsin, Freedom From Religion Foundation (1997)
[2] Socrates Scholastics, Ecclesiastical History (undated), http://www.cosmopolis.com/alexandria/hypatia-bio-socrates.html and http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/hypatia.html; Bishop John of Nikiu, Chronicle (undated), http://www.cosmopolis.com/alexandria/hypatia-bio-john.html
[3] Uncredited, “Giordano Bruno,” Catholic Encyclopedia website (undated), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03016a.htm; uncredited, “Giordano Bruno,” The Galileo Project website (undated), http://galileo.rice.edu/chr/bruno.html
