How Did Religion and Atheism Evolve?

Different philosophies, atheism and religion may impose different ways of life or not, as there are intermediary shades, because in most cases, there is no perfectly homogeneous religiosity or atheism.

Faithful people can be from bigots to those who do not practice any rite or cult accessories, but they do believe in an impersonal divine abstraction (deists, pantheists and so on), as also amongst atheists there are various hues, from rationalist atheists, which is more profound, to sentimental atheists, which can be sincere, but without any logical or scientific argumentation.

These two philosophies shaped along the history the way we see the world and existence, and had a deep social and educative impact.

But a complete education cannot reject the study of a comparative history of the religions, nor experimental sciences or evolution.

The religious man is a person which feels he/she must believe in something supernatural, in a colossal power which is situated over himself/herself and which cannot be detected, nor defined, as it seems impersonal, even if he/she individualizes it in a specific form, sometimes personifiable, from stone (lithomorphism) to tree (dendromorphism), animal (zoomorphism) and human shape (anthropomorphism), like ancient Greek gods.

In a certain philosophical state, this man is pushed towards the abstractness of the object of his/her faith (to God, Allah or Buddha).

The divinity type was fixed in parameters accessible to all religious people by theologists, and the believer accepts passively the dogma; he/she just needs the divinity as appeal instance, before death or after death, for injustices or failures to which he/she considers is subjected by people, phenomena or situations.

The religious person cannot be constant, as he/she may experience moments of doubt or revolt, but his/her general structure won't allow it a total gate, the religion abandonment, unless in extremely rare cases.

The believer is an irrational; he/she may mimic ration, accidentally and a mystic stage, whose inner mechanism is a total loss of self in the ecstatic way.

According to the practiced religion and local traditions, the faith is the motivation and goal of each religious system and has an affective root, to which dogmas, holly books and mythological tradition become integrally accepted formulas, a spontaneous act of pure option without logical control.

Admitting without reserves and critics a mystical-mythological information, any believer will reject any other source of knowledge than divine revelation, sometimes completed (like in many fanatic sects) by illumination through grace.

Religion is a mystical refuge in a transcendent system that became a tool of explaining the unknown, the inexplicable at a given moment.

Even in inferior mytho-religious states (animatism, animism, demonology, fetishism and totemism), the cave men or those of the archaic civilizations tried to explain the environment, vegetation, animals, stars, light and heat or essential phenomena (life, death), their destiny and that of the world; religion became a report between human and Universe.

The administrative, clerical organization of the religion established a set of rewards and punishments, generally posthumously, becoming an instrument of population molding.

In this stage, religion is dominant in the society, not necessarily theocratic, like ancient Israel or Tibet, like medieval Catholic and Islamic states.

In those cases, religion settled a social inequality in the name of the equality of all people in the face of divine justice and a deep resignation with the life and faith, because of the post-death reward (the "virgins rewards in paradise" for the Muslim suicidals sounds familiar?).

The current religious people experience, facing the informational and technological boom, a feeling of resignation and alienation.

Even in the oldest cultural forms, notions existed indicating a stage of disbelief.

Protagoras, in the fifth century BC, is the first real atheist philosopher; he said gods do not exist, in existence or mind, and that ancient people turned in gods all useful things to life, like sun, moon or rivers.

Even the Bible signals the existence of atheists during David's times.

Amongst other examples, in Psalm X: " The godless says in his proud: "His anger does not follow me. There is no God!" So are all his thoughts. Every path he goes is all right".

Greek philosopher Antiphon reached the conclusion there is only the real world, auto-existent.

Atheism starts with the doubt; certain affective states fuel the skepticism.

But only rationality can bring an argument.
From the first decades of the XXth century, atheism became a massive phenomenon, devoid of sentimentalism, manifesting a complete refusal of religious attitude going to the rejection of any religion.

The current atheism is intensively fueled, wittingly or not, by science and technology.

The atheism of the last decades of the XIXth century was rather a sentimental one, fueled by a scientific enough that made some believe that, before the discovery of the radioactivity and quantum physics, physics had given everything.

An atheist rejecting sentimentally the religion, without the base of an information is a bigot atheist, similar to the religious bigot.

Cause atheism is a global philosophical doctrine, based on rational rejection, based on the information delivered by experimental sciences, of the divinity and the supernatural domain, mythic and mystic.