'act Against The Atheistical Opinions Of The Deists',

[R. S. Martin]

So deists are atheists.

 

 

 

You could get hung for it, I guess.

If you lived in Scotland in 1693 or earlier.

 

 

After 1693 the guys in the Kirks had to use more subtle means. Deism was growing stronger. Maybe that is why they made this law in 1696.

 

 

I found it in Alexander Broadie's The Scottish Enlightenment, 2003, p. 34.

[quicksand]

Well, compare that too Justin Martyr. Christians of the 2ce were accused of being athiests by the, then, pagan Roman senate. Justin's famous apologies address this. If I remember correctly, he compares how great Yawheh is with Zeus.

[Ex-COG]

So an atheist could be defined as "someone who is against/doesn't believe in my God" instead of "someone who is against/doesn't believe in any God"?

[R. S. Martin]

So an atheist could be defined as "someone who is against/doesn't believe in my God" instead of "someone who is against/doesn't believe in any God"?

 

Maybe that's it. I must say it has me confused. There's something very different about the belief from what is taught here. Socrates was killed for being atheist. The people at whose hands he died were definitely not the people of the Judeo-Christian god. Maybe people of Zeus--I have a terrible time keeping the names of the gods straight. I guess Socrates was Greek and the Greeks had an entire Patheon or family or whatever of gods.

[quicksand]

Religions are mutually-exclusive. Makes sense. Otherwise, they would all be the same religion without the different doctrines, dogmas and articles-of-faith which consititute them. Hellensitic-paganism did have the one great advantage of being able to aggregrate other gods in the corpus of theistic belief (if not in practice) and sometimes inventing new, syncretic belief systems with gods to follow. However, paganism was not able to exclude one god above all others - as with monotheism. This is what made Jews and Christians such a pain-in-the-ass when it came to the order of society of the day- the monotheists were not able to worship all the gods and were failing in their civic duties as citizens.

 

Ironically, now, Christians accuse non-Christian theists of being atheists for not upholding to the precieved civic duty of worshipping Yawheh, and Yawheh alone. Which brings to mind a further irony, that it was Christianity which has done more to remove theistic belief from society then atheism by limiting the choices of theistic belief for people to explore and hold.

[R. S. Martin]

There really must be something unique about a god powerful enough to sprout three separate religions, and to grow from a desert deity to a world-wide Almighty God three to four thousand years later by whose Word half the human population lives and dies. The Abrahamic God, no matter how he/she/it or derivatives are perceived, is one powerful long-lived entity that has shaped history, humanity, and in a tiny way the universe, for a long time to come. While the actual impact on the universe may be negligible, there are machines in space because of humans who believe in, or wish to refute the existence of, the Abrahamic God. At least, I am quite sure that has been part of the motivation of space exploration.

 

As I learn about history--about other people in other times and places, I try to imagine what some future generation might see in looking back at us. Will the time come when all traces of Christianity will have vanished? What will they teach students then? What will descriptions of present-day Christianity in all its variations sound like? Sometimes I wish I could be the proverbial fly on the wall and listen in. I am afraid, though, that I would have to hang around for another couple millennia, and that is an awful long time. Also, what will be here in its place?