Contemporary atheists usually claim that atheism is a product of modernity, connect it to naturalism and to progress in general (see Baggini 2003). Scholars who are more sensitive to history add that atheism might have originated in ancient Greece. Jan N. Bremmer belongs to them and writes:
First, the Greeks discovered theoretical atheism, which “can be seen to be one of the most important events in the history of religion” [W. Burkert]. Second, the Greeks invented the term atheos. […] Third, Greeks and Romans, pagans and Christians, soon discovered the utility of the term “atheist” as a means to label opponents. The invention of atheism would open a new road to intellectual freedom, but also enabled people to label opponents in a new way. Progress rarely comes without a cost (2007, p.22)
This is really interesting. If we broaden the picture to include India, we can see that “one of the most important events in the history of religion” occurred in more than one place in the history of religions and that this applies also to terminology. By contrast, the use of “atheist” as an offensive label is not shared by Indian thinkers, who rather used in a polemical sense the label nāstika. This nicely frees the concept of atheism from its polemical bias in a South Asian context.
Here I must vehemently disagree. The term nāstika (not ‘nirāstika’, which I have never come across) is a highly polemical term that has been used to disparage philosophical and religious opponents for centuries. This is precisely why the Jainas came to lay such value on their redefinition of ‘deva’ (see my recent post in another, related thread): in interreligious polemics they felt it important to have their own version of ‘god’. There are stories like that about the impalement of the Jainas in Madurai (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impalement_of_the_Jains_in_Madurai for a summary) which illustrate the seriousness of the matter. See also Steven Vose’s article “The Violence of Devotion: Śaivas, Jains and the Periyapurāṇam in Medieval South India” (available on Academia.edu) and a much earlier article by Indira Peterson, “Jains against the Tamil Way”.
Robert, I see your point. However, we must not put polemics, which is verbal and/or written on equal footing with mass murder. Something to think about.
I brought up this mass murder in response to your statement “[t]his nicely frees the concept of atheism from its polemical bias in a South Asian context”. *No!* It does not! The concept of atheism, also in South Asia, is not without its dangers, and people have carried their differences of opinion also very far beyond mere polemics (which were and are also there – and very, very much so) into a violent sphere.
So your “the use of “atheist” as an offensive label is not shared by Indian thinkers” in your original post needs some serious reconsidering, I believe. Not only was (and is) it offensive: it is an offensive label and also goes beyond mere offence.
Let’s unpack this. Bias is a human condition that occurs in our brains whenever we reach an opinion, be it conscious bias, unconscious bias, or bias due to combination of both. This is not an opinion but backed by empirical neuroscientific evidence. Historical evidence shows that there has been a very long tradition of passionate philosophical “debate” in the India. I am sure such debates are full for logical errors and that they betray biases. However, I do not know of anything at the scale of the various inquisitions.
I don’t understand what you’re talking about, and I am not sure it is relevant.
Elisa: “the use of “atheist” as an offensive label is not shared by Indian thinkers, who rather used in this sense the label nirāstika. This nicely frees the concept of atheism from its polemical bias in a South Asian context.”
Robert: There was a lot of polemical bias around the Indian equivalent of the European term ‘atheist’, and this bias at times became so fierce that it led to persecution and mass murders.
Salil: ‘Neuroscience’ and ‘the scale of the various inquisitions’.
If you are trying to say that religiously inspired violence in India in previous centuries was not so great as in Europe, then we will quickly agree. But that has little to do with the question of whether there was a polemical bias about ‘atheism’ or not.
Dear Robert,
thanks for chiming in. I corrected the text of the post. What I meant was just that people used “nāstika” and not “nirīśvara” as a polemical label. While Greek and Latin authors accused each other of being “godless”, Indian authors rather accused each other of being “deniers”. I did not mean to say that there has been no religious violence in South Asia, I am just interested in the label one chooses while trying to justify one’s violence. Jews were not killed in Europe *because of* their being guilt of deicide, but this is (one of) the label(s) that was (were) used against them. Similarly, the term “atheos” has been used so often in a polemical way, that it is hard to get back to any core belief it might have represented in Greek and Latin thought. The situation seems different in India, where other labels were used in one’s religious campaigns —as far as I know at least.
Salil might be right in his implicit suggestion that the luck of a single centralised religious authority hindered the creation of a centralised inquisition and you are certainly right that this did not mean that Jains etc. had an easy time.