Rome vs. the Christians

The Christian Atheists

            Move forward about 300 years. The Romans have conquered Greece -- and, for that matter, the world from England to Egypt. And they’re steamed at some tribes who are, from the Roman viewpoint, atheists. The upstarts won’t treat the Roman emperor as a god-like being, don’t worship Jupiter or other Roman gods, and refuse to believe that the gods even exist.

            Some of these stiff-necked infidels were troublesome enough when they were simply Jews. But now, a splinter group of Jews, ex-Jews and others are following the teachings of a radical rabbi called Jesus. Even worse, they’re attracting more and more people to their atheistic ways, which they call Christian. The Romans tried to stop the Christians by tossing some of them to lions.

            The Romans didn’t think of the Christians as atheists for long, though. By 312 CE, when the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the faith had soaked into the empire and soon became the official, government-sponsored religion.

            Unfortunately for atheists, the Christians were tougher on infidels than the Romans were.

The father of atheism

Now, instead of going from chapter to chapter in order, we're going to skip around a bit. The next chapter is one that I especially enjoyed writing.

Chapter 5

Atheists Throughout History

The history of reasoned atheism is as old as the history of thought.

Benjamin Warfield, theologian[1]

            Strap in and hang on. You’re about to find out where unbelief comes from and how it got where it is. It’s been making trouble for longer than most people know.

The First Atheist

            Do you believe in Apollo?

            Anaxagoras didn’t, so the Greeks threw him in jail.

            Anaxagoras was born around 500 BCE in what’s now Turkey. He headed to Athens, probably the most advanced Greek city-state, and set up as a philosopher -- well before Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and others got famous doing the same thing.

            The Greek religion said that the sun was actually the golden deity Apollo, but Anaxagoras said that it was just a hot rock. What’s more, he said, everything in the earth and sky came from natural forces and materials, not godly ones.

            Athenian lawmakers knew a troublemaker when they heard one. Somewhere in the 430s, they arrested Anaxagoras on the charge of impiety. He left the city-state soon thereafter, because the Athenians kicked him out -- or possibly because they condemned him to death (or some other harsh punishment), and he picked up his toga and ran.

            Anaxagoras probably wasn’t the first in Western civilization to speak and write about the world in a nontheistic way. He wasn’t even a complete atheist. He seems to have believed that a mind permeates the universe.

            But he may have been the first to become widely famous (and infamous) for saying that the gods that everyone else worships just don’t exist. He was so notorious that years later, when Socrates was called an atheist, the old man ridiculed the charge by asking, “Do you imagine that you are accusing Anaxagoras?”[2]

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[1] Benjamin Warfield, “Atheism,” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Volume 1 (Funk & Wagnalls, 1908), http://www.googlebooks.com

[2] Plato, The Apology of Socrates, translated by D.F. Nevill (F.E. Robinson and Company, 1901), Google Books website