World's first atheists, 600 BCE

Ancient India: ground zero for agnosticism and atheism

The untold history of India’s vital atheist philosophy

Rationality, skepticism, and atheism have been central parts of Indian thinking for 2,700 years. Contrary to common belief, the hallmark of India’s philosophy is its critique of religions.

India is ground zero for the world’s oldest and most persistent documented tradition of atheism and skepticism has been around for almost three millennia, since Vedic times and the oldest of the Upanishads (commentaries to the Vedas), ca. 7th century BCE.

The skeptical Indian schools have their forebears in the oldest of the Vedic texts. In Rig Veda (“Knowledge of Verses”, created in Punjab, in today’s Pakistan/India, ca. 1500–1100 BCE), we find a remarkable agnostic worldview. In contrast to the fairly clear-cut answers of the later monotheistic religions, the “Creation Hymn” (10.129) of the Rig Veda offers questions and speculations:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?

Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?

The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.

Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Such extracts illustrate that agnostic doubts do exist in the earliest of Indian writings.


https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/06/16/the-untold-history-of-indias-vital-atheist-philosophy/?amp
 
Hello Cypress,

Cypress said:
Charvaka was a philosophical school of thought, developed in India c. 600 BCE, stressing materialism as the means by which one understands and lives in the world.

Materialism holds that perceivable matter is all that exists; concepts such as the soul and any other supernatural entities or planes of existence are simply inventions of imaginative people.

The Charvaka vision rejected all supernatural claims, all religious authority and scripture, the acceptance of inference and testimony in establishing truth, and any religious ritual or tradition. The essential tenets of the philosophy were:

-Direct perception as the only means of establishing and accepting any truth
-What cannot be perceived and understood by the senses does not exist
-All that exists are the observable elements of air, earth, fire, and water
-The ultimate good in life is pleasure; the only evil is pain
-Pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain is the sole purpose of human existence
-Religion is an invention of the strong and clever who prey on the weak.



https://www.worldhistory.org/Charvaka/
Click to expand...

Um no, people were atheists naturally; long before humans even developed language.

It wasn't until stories could be told that religion began.

One of the considerations cited by atheists is that humans are simply animals who can talk and tell stories, keep records, make books. All of the rest of the animals on Earth that cannot speak in languages or tell stories do not practice religion.

What is the difference between human animals and the rest of the animals? All are animals.

The one separating factor is that humans can tell stories. And humans can have religion.
 
PoliTalker said:
Hello Cypress,



Um no, people were atheists naturally; long before humans even developed language.

It wasn't until stories could be told that religion began.

One of the considerations cited by atheists is that humans are simply animals who can talk and tell stories, keep records, make books. All of the rest of the animals on Earth that cannot speak in languages or tell stories do not practice religion.

What is the difference between human animals and the rest of the animals? All are animals.

The one separating factor is that humans can tell stories. And humans can have religion.
Click to expand...

I have read that Homo Neaderthal sapiens and Homo Sapien Sapiens were practicing burial rituals more than 100,000 years ago, suggesting some awareness of a spiritual realm. I am pretty sure animism was the first religion, even before language evolved. Cave art is not just doodles. It represents some kind of spiritual awareness.

I think language supposedly evolved around 50k years ago.

The interesting thing about ancient India, is that it seems to be the first place in recorded history where sophisticated and vibrant skeptical and materialistic thought came to the forefront.
 
I would not make religion illegal. But I would make churches pay property tax. In the US, taxpayers are forced to subsize religious institutions.
 
Prior to this thread, if a poll was taken on this board asking about when atheism, as a vibrant and intellectual school of thought, really began 90 percent of posters here would probably have pointed to the scientific revolution and Enlightenment era of the 17th and 18th century.

The interesting thing about ancient India is that a vibrant and philosophically sophisticated form of atheistic thought and skeptical materialism existed in the 7th century BCE.

In some ways, India was the most intellectually sophisticated and vibrant culture on Earth, through all of the Axial Age, and perhaps beyond.
 
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