Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World | Hacker News Reader

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

newramblerreview.com

62 pointsdiodorus21 comments

Hinduism have a rich tradition of rejecting the personal god [1]. Some schools completely reject the creator god while others take agnostic position.

Four Vedas are considered oldest Hindu scriptures. Among the four, Rig Veda which is considered the highest and oldest casts doubts on god's abilities in its creation hymns.[2]

> The Gods are later than this world's production. Who knows then whence it first came into being? He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it, Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he knows not

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism [2] https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rigveda

More than this, there was an era of outright materialism in ancient Indian philosophy; but it was so thoroughly repressed we know little about it.

Platonism and Christianity both could reasonably be seen as atheistic from the perspective of classical antiquity, in that their view of what god was, was radically different from mainstream religious practice. In Platonism, especially, the One was very abstract and impersonal.

Yes. The way I see it, the term "atheism" is too loaded with its own contemporary meanings to allow reasonable discussion of the ancient world. Today, it is assumed that it negates "The" "God" as we understand the current definition of "him", not "the gods" as the ancients understood them at the time. For the current believer, the ancients all haven't believed in his God.

If one was to describe the gods at that time, they were "like humans, often with the superpowers, but primarily different from the humans by being immortal."(1) That's it. You don't have to completely negate the existence of such entities to claim that Zeus doesn't cause the thunder, or that there are natural laws which fully determine some phenomena. So the "natural philosophers" could search for such laws, negating the particular role of "the gods" but still not having to explicitly declare their complete non-existence.

1) And if you read the Old Testament, you'll find that beautiful scene that reflect the understanding of these times, where "the God" (as we understand him today) makes a visit to the guy, enters his house, sits with him, talks with him, eats with him... Fully comparable to what the gods do in the Iliad, for example. Not to mention that in the Old Testament the "sacrifices" were necessary, even "the God" was regularly "hungry" for the meat of the animals used to feed the "mortal" people. Again just like the gods in the Iliad.

Sort of.

Christianity is a mixed bag. Popular christian imagination is still filled with miracles and supernatural beings acting on human life. On the other hand, many christians don't hold such views and have a much more deflationary account of divinity. But when I think of early christianity, I think of visions of angels, and curse tablets.

Nothing is known for sure what Plato really thought, specially when it comes to his unwritten doctrines. But his dialogues often put a strong emphasis on piety, and he also makes references to magical practice (think Charmides' charm). He's also been heaped by ancient interpreters with groups strongly associated with mystic practices, namely the Pythagoreans and the Eleatics. Neoplatonists, on the other hand, were associated with Julian I's attempt at revitalizing traditional roman religion and with ritual magic (i.e. theurgy), despite their adherence to the idea of a highly impersonal deity.

None of these guys (Christians, Neoplatonists) were quite free from the traditional practices of their times.

jesus wept ;)

I normally really dislike comments that are not about the content, but, god, why is the font so HUGE?

So you can read it easily. I think that size (and color contrast) is ideal.

There might be something device specific going on there. On a large phone it's total toontown, way too big.

Nope, it's way too large on my 15 inch mbp as well.

When a webpage is an article, I don't understand why the normal behavior is that each website get's to (seemingly randomly) decide how its readers will interact with its text. It would be preferable if each user got to define a standard viewing mode for articles right in their browser. Something similar to the rendering settings for reader mode on iOS or on the Kindle or Readability. And then browsers firmly enforced rendering pages to the readers preference, not to the content creators.

As it stands the publishers hold all the cards and rarely does it end up being something positive.

Often instead it's something negative like the jumbo fonts on this or for a few examples:

* Font some eye straining light greyish color or too tiny

* Margins too narrow, or too wide

* Scroll-jacking.

* Triple click to highlight line turned into other function

* Excessive animated flashy ads

* `You might also like` links embedded throughout

* Register/Pay-wall

* Tracking

... (this lists goes on much longer but you get the point)

So why does the writer decide how the reader gets to read? It's not expected that the reader dictate to the writer what text editor they use and how they write. There should be a more rational demarcation in this relationship. All of us are readers more than we are writers. Yet this situation persists.

(And note I am only talking about articles, not forums, or webapps, etc)

I really wish we could differentiate between 'article-like' (where I can strip out everything but one main block of text) and app-like (that requires full javascript and DOM apis).

That alone would "fix" 90% of the problems I see today. I don't need to see your fucking autoplay ad just to read your article. At LEAST let me pay you to get a somewhat sane, non-crippled copy of your article in an RSS feed; a single payment would offset a lifetime of no ad clicks.

That's a pretty good idea. I was thinking a reason why this may exist is because there is an organized profit motive on the publisher / advertiser side. They make more money by controlling the user experience, and they make no money by leaving it to the users, because then their ads will be dodged, their in-site links won't be followed and their users will bounce away.

Perhaps, if some sort of fully anonymozied microtip system was integrated into the pages as well then it could work. I am thinking essentially something at the protocol level, where when the HTTP request is made there is a microtip HEADER, the site would collect the tip and respond with simply marked up text. Otherwise the response is the ad riddled tracky garbage we all have to suffer through currently. It would give the publishers some sort of profit incentive to come back over to the users side.

There would be an expectation to provide a second tip automatically managed by the browser after some reasonable amount of time unless the user cancels it, because the article sucked. I think with time (or maybe right off the bat) only the second tip exists as publishers get to trust users more.

I don't think the tips would have to be very large to make it work either. I do think having it integrated right into the browsers ui is pretty important. I also think having a standard protocol and anonymous system (though one which a user could opt out of if they wanted to demonstrate patronage publicly) is also important. And I think that having the tip automatically go through unless the user opts to cancel it either immediately via button in the browser or within a day or a week (in some history blotter, where they could also just send pay it immediately) or whatever is pretty important.

I completely agree. I make heavy use of Firefox's "reader mode", and I wish it were enabled by default. It is by far superior to the normal experience with all that designery crap you're describing. Only very infrequently do I find an article that gets cut off or doesn't flow correctly in reader mode; I'd much rather just use it all the time, everywhere it's available, and disable it manually on the rare occasion I don't want it.

Indeed, I think a text mode button is a needed and worthy UI addition in FF and chrome.

Agreed—it's also way too huge for comfortable reading with the column width.

If you've an issue with the size just hit the 'reader view' on Firefox, or 'Distill View' on Chrome etc..

  or 'Distill View' on Chrome

Is this an extension or a feature I'm unaware of?

Yes.

Which one is it and link?

Or use the zoom feature of your browser...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com