We will take a break now from solar physics, and go back to controversies of areligious philosophy, namely dealing with a certain meme that's been floating around the past few years: that atheism is some new, "rambunctious" form of rebellion, devised just to have a riff on organized religion (which long predated it).
Atheists then are relative newbies who just came on the scene and whose sole purpose is to make sport of religions, god beliefs, and other sanctimonious nonsense - such as heaven-hell and "sin". In this regard, atheists have been compared to wild teenagers feeling their oats, trying to make themselves out to be independent before they are ready.
All their arguments, comments and critiques of religion and religious thought amount to simple bravado, the type seen and heard when a teen gets his first car.
Of course, this is all totally wrong. Atheists and Atheism have actually been in existence for thousands of years before Christianity. Thus, the truth is that Atheism represents the "parental" wiser- and judicious philosophy, while religion represents the brash infant. Not the other way around! But whacked out religious zealots have tried to paint Atheism as exactly the opposite: some newfangled form of irreverent revolution just thought up to give the religious grief.
For fixing ideas here, it helps to look at some of the quotes of the ancients. These may be the best evidence of how Atheism dates into antiquity and atheists sentiments were expressed by naturalist thinkers long before Christ walked on Earth (assuming he really did!)
Let us then look at some of these quotes:
Heraclitus (535- 475 BCE):
"Religion is a disease"
Aristophanes (448 - 380 BCE):
"Surely you don't believe in the gods! What's your argument? Where's your prooof?"
Petronius Arbiter (27 - 66 CE):
"It was fear that first brought gods into the world"
Seneca (4 BCE - 65 CE):
"Religion is regarded as the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful"
Abu Al-Ahmad (973- 1057 CE):
"The world holds two classes of men: intelligent men without religion and religious men without intelligence"
Cicero (106- 43 CE):
"What old woman is so stupid now as to tremble at those tales of hell that were once so firmly believed in?"
Epicurus: (341 - 270 BCE):
"Faith is the credulous belief in the reality of phantoms"
Confucius (551 - 479 BCE):
"Why talk of spirits when you do not understand men?"
Pliny the Elder (23 - 79 CE):
"It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it may be, pays any regard to human affairs".
Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE):
"Men create gods in their own image"
What we discern from the above, is that neither Richard Dawkins nor Sam Harris nor any other modern Atheists have anything on any of these ancients. We also see that compelling and cogent expressions of rejection of religion, faith and deities held firm in ancient minds (at least the most disciplined, and discriminating, intelligent) long before Christianity appeared.
Clearly, it is effrontery of the most onerous kind to therefore have Christians high on themselves ranting against Atheists for being "upstarts"! We are nothing of the kind, and our type was here long before the Christers first pounded a bible.
Of course, none of this will stop them from turning the facts on their heads and trying to create the impression that we atheists are the nouveaux revolutionaries attempting to overthrow established beliefs that were here long before we were.
As opposed to the Atheist being wise and prescient enough to spot bunkum ages before it became organized into formal codswallop. Such as expressed and embodied into fictional works like the King James Book of Fairy Tales. A book that actually needs to have multiple warnings (for mental health of adults) appended to its covers.
Yes, I have a KJV too. I even read it sometimes. To always remind myself of how primitive the mentality of humans used to be, before the dawn of Science and the Enlightenment, and the use of reason. I also use it to remind myself that nowhere in the book was any actual "God" being discussed or referenced, but rather an artifact window dressed as a god-concept.
And we know all of those are relative. Which the ancients like Aristophanes also know - which is why they didn't take them seriously!
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