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Ancient wisdom
(lemmy.world)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23770280
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this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2025
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It's a fake quote. Epicurus lived in a polytheistic society. He didn't say these things about one god, he said it about all the gods. This quote here is a localisation by Hume which erases Epicurus' paganism for a Christian audience.
Your atheist meme is still pushing Christian biases.
Monotheistic religions did exist and were well known to them though
There are older texts that explore the same questions, even before Greek polytheism. The "dialogue between a man and his god" and the "poem of the righteous sufferer" are Mesopotamian texts from the second millennium BCE that basically say the same thing (why does my god permits my suffering when I pray so hard?), and yes, it was already a polytheistic world view, but the question still remained why a god could allow their devout followers to suffer. Even when only accounting for a God's specific domain, like sickness or nightmares, rather than total omnipotence.
There's no problem with Humes reframing the question for absolute omnipotence when that's the zealotry the people in his time or in our time are confronted with. You can't shift the blame of the Christian bias when this question is a response to those who claim that their god is superior and infallible.
Hume could have quoted Epicurus as saying "the gods" instead of "God". It would have been more honest. Hume misquoted Epicurus as though he was a Christian.
Which is funny because as far as I know none of the pagan gods are presented as omnipotent or omnibenevolent. Works good applied on the Christian god though
Yeah, Epicurus wasn't making any kind of huge atheistic point. He was just exploring the Greeks' relationship to their religion. Hume is the one who co-opted and misquoted him to serve an anti-christianity agenda that didn't even exist when Epicurus lived.
Oh no better stop using this meme then!
God as in the omniscient prime mover was a philosopical god in contrast to the Olympians and chthonic deities (Not to be confused with the Cthonian deities) who were sustained by the temples for commoners.
I can't speak to Epicurus, but Socrates' charges of impeity and corrupting the youth with perverse ideas were at least partly to do with showing the philosophical theist positions that were antithetical to devotion to the common ministries.
It's much the way only scientists and deep academics in the 20th century were openly atheist. The rest of us skeptics were members of liberal ministries, and may not have gone to church much.