Is atheism its own nemesis?
Sometimes we wonder why there haven't been any prophets since Muhammad. The answer is that there probably have been, but that they have met rather immediate ends as their message was not well received by the establishment. Another answer often is that people are no longer susceptible to such nonsense and that if a person were to show up today and go "hey I represent god" we'd probably throw him in a mental institution.
Going with the former option rather than the latter, it's easy to see that Jesus wasn't much different. He carried a message that was not well received and he was put to death for it. It's funny how christianity didn't take off with the death of Jesus, but only a few hundred years later with the assembly of the Bible and the conversion of Constantine I to Christianity. Especially if you look at the speed with which Christianity spread, like on the map at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History...E2.80.93476.29
Then you can see how Christianity was at best an illegal minority religion before it was endorsed by Roman leadership. Now what I wonder is the following. What made room within the Roman empire for the practice of Christianity? My answer, even though historians may correct me on this, is simply the fact that the Roman world was crumbling. It was no longer the grand and glorious Empire it had once been and perhaps in desperation people turned to other sources of fortune? This could make people more receptive to the message that Christianity preached.
Of course in the centuries that followed, Christianity became the dominant religion and remained unchallenged until the late 20th century, where muslim immigration and the rise of Atheism are ensuring quite the spiritual divide in Christian Europe (and America to a lesser extent).
So it makes sense that there wouldn't have been any new prophets: there simply wasn't room for them. The same is true for the muslim world. After muhammad proceeded to spread his religion by the sword and converting even Zoroastrian Persia to this new faith, was there really any room in the muslim Mid-east for anything new? No, not at all. Matter of fact, maybe even less so than in Christianity because Islam ensures the obedience of its followers by issueing the death penalty to apostates.
And now atheism rises. We atheists are not united in anything other than our lack of belief in god, and even though we often hear claims from the religious that atheism is a religion too, nothing could be further from the truth. Just because a few atheists are very militant in the expression of their convictions does not mean that that makes up, by any margin, for the complete lack of a dogma and clergical structure or any other form of unity.
But the irony could be that in experiencing atheism as a religion, say in a fashion similar to the Imperial Truth of Warhammer 40k, we are able to hold off the coming of a new lunatic with a new religious message. Because afterall, what can make people more willing to listen to the words of a new god than the removal of their old one? And that's all atheism is doing.
What if atheism, by becoming more widespread and turning into the norm sooner or later, actually paves the way for a new prophet? Many of us would cheer at the demise of Christianity and Islam, but what if their existence is the very thing that keeps new, possibly even more genocidal religions at bay?
Not saying that this is what I think, but it's certainly food for thought. Dr. Croccer for example has pointed out before that most atheists don't believe in god simply because they can't seem to be bothered and it's precisely this apathic demographic that would most easily be converted into something new. Will atheism only experience a century or two of domination before it's replaced by something else? Are we atheists merely part of a transitionary phase in which the old religions vanish and new religions rise?
Is the irony here that only by experiencing atheism as a dogma we will be able to prevent that from happening?
It's a scary thought.
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Originally Posted by The Dude
and he'll be exposed.
