Were there any atheists in the OT times? Or is that a New Age thing?

Answer 1

There were definitely atheists in ancient Rome.

Answer 2

Primitive humanity had no idea how the world works. To create any kind of undertanding, they had to personalize the forces of nature, giving them volition and personality to explain their apparently arbitrary actions. But if one phenomenon represents the action of a god, then everything did. Gods proliferated, then organized into hierarchies, until the great consolidation of monotheism.

Among the gods were national gods who looked after the political interests of their people, telling them when to wage war, when to make peace and how to trade goods. YHWH apparently started out that way. Only when Jerusalem fell in 586 BCE did the Jewish people fully come to understand God as a universal deity.

Surely there were people who didn't buy into all this supernatural rigamarole. But they often didn't find much encouragement among their fellow citizens. Your god was part of your national identity. To reject him was to reject your citizenship.

The other challenge was to come up with an alternative explanation for all this stuff that happens. Travellers and scholars exposed to other cultures were the most likely to realize there was more than one way of thinking about the world, even godlessly.

Many cases of atheism came out of efforts to find a better way of explaining how God works than a popular but flawed model. By questioning fundamental premises, one opens oneself up to rejecting the whole foundation of one's belief structure. Much social damage can be self-inflicted by such an exercise, so one has to be motivated to try it, either by already feeling alienated or by being thoroughly unsatisfied with a conventional paradigm. It's the intellectuals and non-conformists who are at most "risk" of apostacy.

It's easier today. There are more natural expalanations available and fewer dire consequences for rejecting belief. But as long as people have thought, there have been people who have rejected popular but unproivable beliefs. But not all have dared act on their beliefs.

Answer 3

There were some. Science had far fewer explanations for things then, so it was easer to be religious because it explained everything. So the numbers were much smaller, and many hid the fact that they were. But there were some.

Answer 4

There have been atheists in every age of humanity. Check out the writings of Socrates, Aristophanies and contemporaries. They predate Jesus.

Answer 5

Everyone is born atheist. Everyone was always born an atheist. They're brainwashed into believing in religions later on by parents or by those horrid missionaries.

Answer 6

Billy's a smart guy for a musician