ABSTRACT
This chapter presents demythologize atheism and deism as they have been constructed in much of the existing literature. Atheism is one of the central concepts of Western culture. Modern notions of atheism cannot be applied without qualification to Greek and Roman classical antiquity. Atheism in the late eighteenth century was not the same thing as the adoption of naturalistic and determinist philosophical views. In many historical contexts atheism needs to be understood in positive as well as in negative terms. For Karl Marx, for example, atheism involved a Promethean assertion of human agency and a revolt against subjection to heteronomous powers. During the Renaissance, humanist scholars became aware that many pagan philosophers had developed rational accounts of the deity and also complex ethical systems without the benefit of revelation. In China, for example, Confucian scholars were atheists in the sense of thinkers who rejected the entities posited by folk religion.
