I had the pleasure of participating in a workshop entitled, “The Benefit of the Doubt. Between Scepticism and Godlessness, Critique or Indifference in Ancient Mediterranean Religious Traditions” in February. Sponsored by Humboldt University and Leipzig University, it took place in Berlin. A short description and the conference program is here. The workshop, in a sense, picked up where Tim Whitmarsh’s book, Battling the God: Atheism in the Ancient World left off. Whitmarsh (who was not at the workshop) actually plays a bit loose with what he means by “atheism,” lumping into it other manifestations of doubting not only the existence but also the power of the deities. The workshop organizers, Dr. Nicole Hartmann and Dr. Franziska Naether, followed this productive ambiguity, encouraging the participants to think broadly about how and why those in antiquity, from across a wide geographical and temporal distance, expressed and discussed this larger issue of “doubt” of the divine. Before this workshop, even after reading Whitmarsh’s book, I never thought much about atheism in antiquity. If it existed at all, it was, I thought, a fringe phenomenon; after all, wasn’t atheism really a modern phenomenon? Thus, in thinking about the classical rabbis, my mind did […]
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