Atheism’s Long, Angry, Anxious History
Before There Was a Secular Argument Against Believing in God, There Was a Groundswell of Popular Distrust
“God is dead,” Nietzsche claimed, “and we have killed him.”
Well, maybe. But who is the we here? Who did the dreadful deed, and when, and how?
The usual suspects include David Hume, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and the rest of the philosophers, scientists and intellectuals who, during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, were accused of directly bludgeoning God. Since then, the story goes, the rest of the world has been slowly catching up—and as a result we have our current ‘secular’ age.
But I don’t …
