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Atheists
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists. Historically, evidence of atheistic viewpoints can be traced back to classical antiquity and early Indian philosophy. In the Western world, atheism declined after Christianity gained prominence. The 16th century and the Age of Enlightenment marked the resurgence of atheistic thought in Europe. Atheism achieved a significant position worldwide in the 20th century. Estimates of those who have an absence of belief in a god range from 500 million to 1.1 billion people. Atheist organizations have defended the autonomy of science, freedom of thought, secularism, and secular ethics. Arguments for atheism range from philosophical to social approaches. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atheism
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the Existence of God, existence of Deity, deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists. Historically, evidence of atheistic viewpoints can be traced back to classical antiquity and Nāstika, early Indian philosophy. In the Western world, atheism declined after Christianity gained prominence. The 16th century and the Age of Enlightenment marked the resurgence of atheistic thought in Europe. Atheism achieved a significant position worldwide in the 20th century. Estimates of those who have an absence of belief in a god range from 500 million to 1.1 billion people. Atheist organizations have defended the autonomy of science, freedom of thought, secularism, and secular ethics. Arguments for atheism range from p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Argument From Nonbelief
An argument from nonbelief is a philosophical argument for the nonexistence of God that asserts an inconsistency between God's existence and a world that fails to recognize such an entity. It is similar to the classic argument from evil in affirming an inconsistency between the world that exists and the world that would exist if God had certain desires combined with the power to see them through. There are two key varieties of the argument. The argument from reasonable nonbelief (or the argument from divine hiddenness) was first elaborated in J. L. Schellenberg's 1993 book ''Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason''. This argument says that if God existed (and was perfectly good and loving) every reasonable person would have been brought to believe in God; however, there are reasonable nonbelievers; therefore, this God does not exist. Theodore Drange subsequently developed the argument from nonbelief, based on the mere existence of nonbelief in God. Drange considers the disti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Agnosticism
Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, the divine, or the supernatural is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact. (page 56 in 1967 edition) It can also mean an apathy towards such religious belief and refer to personal limitations rather than a worldview. Another definition is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist." The English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley said that he originally coined the word ''agnostic'' in 1869 "to denote people who, like imself confess themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning a variety of matters ncluding the matter of God's existence about which metaphysicians and theologians, both orthodox and heterodox, dogmatise with the utmost confidence." Earlier thinkers had written works that promoted agnostic points of view, such as Sanjaya Belatthiputta, a 5th-century BCE Indian philosophe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baron D'Holbach
Paul Thiry, Baron d'Holbach (; ; 8 December 1723 – 21 January 1789), known as d'Holbach, was a Franco-German philosopher, encyclopedist and writer, who was a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a ''salon''. He helped in the dissemination of "Protestant and especially German thought", particularly in the field of the sciences, but was best known for his atheism, and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being '' The System of Nature'' (1770) and ''The Universal Morality'' (1776). Biography Sources differ regarding d'Holbach's dates of birth and death. His exact birthday is unknown, although records show that he was baptised on 8 December 1723. Some authorities incorrectly give June 1789 as the month of his death. D'Holbach's mother, Catherine Jacobina (''née'' Holbach; 1684–1743), was the daughter of Johannes J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Age Of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment) was a Europe, European Intellect, intellectual and Philosophy, philosophical movement active from the late 17th to early 19th century. Chiefly valuing knowledge gained through rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment was concerned with a wide range of social and Politics, political ideals such as natural law, liberty, and progress, toleration and fraternity (philosophy), fraternity, constitutional government, and the formal separation of church and state. The Enlightenment was preceded by and overlapped the Scientific Revolution, which included the work of Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton, among others, as well as the philosophy of Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and John Locke. The dating of the period of the beginning of the Enlightenment can be attributed to the publication of René Descartes' ''Discourse on the Method'' in 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Existence Of God
The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion and theology. A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God (with the same or similar arguments also generally being used when talking about the existence of multiple deities) can be categorized as logical, Empirical research, empirical, Metaphysics, metaphysical, Subjectivity, subjective, or Science, scientific. In Philosophy, philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology (the nature and scope of knowledge) and ontology (study of the nature of being or existence) and the Value theory, theory of value (since some definitions of God include perfection). The Western philosophy, Western tradition of philosophical discussion of the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments for the existence of a being responsible for fashioning the universe, referred to as the demiurge or the unmoved mover, that today would be c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supernatural
Supernatural phenomena or entities are those beyond the Scientific law, laws of nature. The term is derived from Medieval Latin , from Latin 'above, beyond, outside of' + 'nature'. Although the corollary term "nature" has had multiple meanings since the ancient world, the term "supernatural" emerged in the Middle Ages and did not exist in the ancient world. The supernatural is featured in folklore and religious contexts, but can also feature as an explanation in more secular contexts, as in the cases of superstitions or belief in the paranormal. The term is attributed to non-physical entity, non-physical entities, such as angels, demons, gods and ghost, spirits. It also includes claimed abilities embodied in or provided by such beings, including Magic (supernatural), magic, telekinesis, levitation (paranormal), levitation, precognition and extrasensory perception. The supernatural is hypernymic to religion. Religions are standardized supernaturalist worldviews, or at least m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion. It is most commonly thought of as the separation of religion from civil affairs and the state and may be broadened to a similar position seeking to remove or to minimize the role of religion in any public sphere. Secularism may encapsulate anti-clericalism, atheism, naturalism, non-sectarianism, neutrality on topics of religion, or antireligion. Secularism is not necessarily antithetical to religion, but may be compatible with it. As a philosophy, secularism seeks to interpret life based on principles derived solely from the material world, without recourse to religion. It shifts the focus from religion towards "temporal" and material concerns. There are distinct traditions of secularism like the French, Turkish, American and Indian models. These differ greatly, from the American emphasis on avoiding an established religion and the freedom of bel ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secular Ethics
Secular ethics is a branch of moral philosophy in which ethics is based solely on human faculties such as logic, empathy, reason or moral intuition, and not derived from belief in supernatural revelation or guidance—a source of ethics in many religions. Secular ethics refers to any ethical system that does not draw on the supernatural, and includes humanism, secularism and freethinking. A classical example of literature on secular ethics is the Kural text, authored by the ancient Indian philosopher Valluvar. Secular ethical systems comprise a wide variety of ideas to include the normativity of social contracts, some form of attribution of intrinsic moral value, intuition-based deontology, cultural moral relativism, and the idea that scientific reasoning can reveal objective moral truth (known as science of morality). Secular ethics frameworks are not always mutually exclusive from theological values. For example, the Golden Rule or a commitment to non-violence, could be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spirituality
The meaning of ''spirituality'' has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man", oriented at "the image of God" as exemplified by the List of founders of religious traditions, founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward Holy Spirit (Christianity), the Holy Spirit and broadened during the Late Middle Ages to include mind, mental aspects of life. In modern times, the term both spread to other religious traditions and broadened to refer to a wider range of experiences, including a range of Western esotericism, esoteric and religious traditions. Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a Sacredness, sacred dimension, and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live", often in a context separate from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theism
Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity. In common parlance, or when contrasted with '' deism'', the term often describes the philosophical conception of God that is found in classical theism—or the conception found in monotheism—or gods found in polytheistic religions—or a belief in God or gods without the rejection of revelation, as is characteristic of deism. Non-theism and atheism is commonly understood as non-acceptance or outright rejection of theism in the broadest sense of the term (i.e., non-acceptance or rejection of belief in God or gods). Related (but separate) is the claim that the existence of any deity is unknown or unknowable; a stance known as agnosticism.(page 56 in 1967 edition) ''Agnostic theism'' is a personal belief in one or more deities along with acceptance that the existence or non-existence of the deity or deities is fundamentally unknowable. A 2020 ''Philpapers'' survey of professional philosophers fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paganism
Paganism (, later 'civilian') is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christians for people in the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, or ethnic religions other than Christianity, Judaism, and Samaritanism. In the time of the Roman Empire, individuals fell into the pagan class either because they were increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population, or because they were not '' milites Christi'' (soldiers of Christ).J. J. O'Donnell (1977)''Paganus'': Evolution and Use, ''Classical Folia'', 31: 163–69. Alternative terms used in Christian texts were '' hellene'', '' gentile'', and '' heathen''. Ritual sacrifice was an integral part of ancient Greco-Roman religion and was regarded as an indication of whether a person was pagan or Christian. Paganism has broadly connoted the "religion of the peasantry". During and after the Middle Ages, the term ''paganism'' was applied to any non-Christian religion, and the term presumed a belief in fal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
