Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Mark Anthony Signorelli gets this right : "One answer would be that modern disbelievers, under the influence of their positivist assumptions, simply have no idea what earlier thinkers meant by the concept of God." This is so much the case that when I discuss the standard, millenia-old idea of God here, readers accuse me of "redefining the word"! And this quote is nice, too: "An atheist is just someone who has failed to notice the perfectly evident necessity of God’s existence."

In a common atheist narrative, religion was a means of social control. Societies developed their own priesthoods, and those priesthoods promoted whatever views of the gods that would maintain them in power. When confronted with cases of brilliant, original thinkers who were theists, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Averroes, Maimonides, Descartes, Leibniz, and so on, these people are likely to respond, "As brilliant as these folks were, they just weren't quite able to escape their cultural milieu." But the Greek monotheists utterly discombobulate this narrative. Heraclitus, Xenophanes , Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were clearly brilliant, innovative thinkers. But by independent thought they developed a monotheism, remarkably consonant (although certainly not identical) to the one developing in Israel, in direct opposition to their cultural milieu. Socrates even went to his death for calling into question the old gods. So, naturally, this bit of history is sim...

Here . When two intelligent philosophers, one a theist and one an atheist, try to discuss the idea of God and naturalism intelligently, one of the atheist ideologues chimes in to chastise the atheist philosopher for even attempting the intelligent discussion.