
Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World - diodorus
http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/classics/imaginings
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drieddust
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](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism_in_Hinduism)
[2]
[https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rigveda](https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Rigveda)

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Nomentatus
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.

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

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joejoebob

      or 'Distill View' on Chrome
    

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

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lgas
Yes.

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civilian
Which one is it and link?

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empath75
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.

~~~
acqq
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.

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jheriko
jesus wept ;)

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kutkloon7
I normally really dislike comments that are not about the content, but, god,
why is the font so HUGE?

~~~
benjaminjackman
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)

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duaneb
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.

~~~
benjaminjackman
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.

