I've never heard of any principle foundations asocieted with atheism and that is because there are no priniciple associated with it. They can not all be generalized under one totality.
Apparently you have not been reading the myriad other threads on this website about atheism. We are free from the constraints of fairy-tale creatures with their bizarre "commandments"
("have no other god before me"--might as well start out by explaining that he's vain, selfish and short-tempered, traits which his followers dutifully mimic), their inscrutable "covenants"
(the Jews are supposed to humbly endure the Exile, the destruction of the Temple several times, the Diaspora, the Holocaust and their current isolation in the Mideast because that vain, selfish, short-tempered god is angry at them for being normal flesh-and-blood mortals who can't quite live up to the Covenant), and their impossible-to-understand "codes"
(kill infidels and 72 virgins await you in Paradise--or was that 72 Virginians in Potomac). So we are free to concentrate on the real world and to put our energy into helping humanity. The most important thing for our species is the maintenance of civilization and that's what we can devote ourselves to if we're strong enough. That means, at a bare minimum, that we can't kill other people
(as Jung pointed out, "the wars among the Christian nations have been the bloodiest in history"), and that we have to give back to civilization at least as much as we take from it
(the defining motto of communism, "to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," is often blamed on atheists, but it is a quote from the Bible and that fairy-tale economic system is one of the regrettable offshoots of Christianity.)
Christians have social standards of behavior, muslims, hindi, etc, but atheist litteraly means "against God".
Where do you religious types come up with this weird shit??? As the Linguistics Moderator, it's up to me to break the news to you that you really fucked that one up abysmally. "Atheism" is from Greek
a-, "without," and
theos, "god." It doesn't mean "against god"; it means "without gods." If the rest of your scholarship is as incompetent as your inability to find the URL for Dictionary.com, it's no wonder that you take comfort in the compulsive ignorance called "religion," which relieves you of the responsibility for checking your own alleged facts. We cannot be "against gods" because gods are imaginary. It would be as silly as being "against" Miss Piggy or Luke Skywalker.
It just so happens that all morals in the world are religious in nature. . . .
Is that right? Let's see, just looking at one particular family of religions, the Abrahamic ones (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), I see that in the name of their imaginary god they have obliterated three entire civilizations out of the six that sprang up on this planet. (Egypt, Inca and Olmec/Maya/Aztec). There's nothing very "moral" about destroying half of the world's cultures, complete with their philosophies, traditions, ways of looking at life and solving problems, even their artistic motifs. In fact, destroying a civilization is the most unforgivable sin that can be committed, so Abrahamic religion gets an F-minus right there. But as if that weren't enough, the litany of sins committed by Abrahamists "because their god is on their side" is enough to make one vomit: shall we start with the institutionalization of slavery? Yes I know that other people have done some of these things too, but the point is that there's no compelling reason to state that religion has a copyright on morality when religious people can flush their morals down the toilet whenever they become inconvenient. Besides, no one else has ever destroyed an entire civilization. Genghis Khan is the only warrior who ever came close to the body count of the Abrahamists, but he was scrupulous about not destroying any cultures; the Mongols and Mughals simply took over the administration of the civilizations they conquered.
Atheism would not exist (from my perspective of course) if it were not for fear of God.
I don't "fear" your stupid imaginary gods any more than I fear Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or the Monsters Under My Bed. However, every time I look at the headlines in my newspaper these days I feel a sense of fear of
your religions--as well as a hefty dose of pure revulsion.
Assuming catastrophe in the time of early man created the concept of God over all the Earth, then it would have had to have been a global event for pinpointing the begining of religion is impossible.
You really need to read more, dude. Just some of the posts on this website would be helpful. The origin of religion is in pre-programmed synapses in our brains that we're born with. It is
an instinct to believe in the supernatural, just like it is an instinct to love your family, or to flee from a large animal with both eyes in front of his face. It's what Carl Jung calls a collection of
archetypes, and he did a very good job of "pinpointing the beginning of religion." Well no one can actually calculate the precise date of its origin, but like all instincts it was passed down in our DNA from a common ancestor. It could be that belief in the supernatural was a survival behavior in an era whose dangers we can't imagine today, so the people who didn't have the instinct died off. Or it could just be an accidental genetic bottleneck like Mitochondrial Eve or Y-Chromosome Adam--an individual with that gene, by luck, was the one whose descendants survived a famine or other catastrophe so we're all his or her children.
An archetype is a behavior or other motif that exists in all societies in all eras, a component of what Jung calls "the collective unconscious." Pull your nose out of the Bible for a couple of days and try reading something a little deeper and a little more useful. We'll help you with the big words if you still can't find Dictionary.com.
The begining of civilization and religion are litterally hand in hand indistinguishable.)
Oh geeze dude, how badly can one person embarrass himself in a single post??? Mesopotamia, the first civilization (literally "the building of cities") was founded in the Middle East around 8000BCE. The other five civilizations (Egypt, China, India, Olmec and Inca) followed later, with Olmec and Inca being quite recent, no earlier than 1000BCE. The Neolithic people (people who lived permanently in farming villages) who came before them, and the Mesolithic people (nomadic hunter-gatherers) who came before
them had well-established religions. We know this because there were Neolithic and Mesolithic people in Africa, Australia and the Americas, "uncontaminated" by contact with outsiders, in historic times. Explorers, missionaries and conquerors wrote about them at length and described their cultures and their belief systems. Before that, the Romans and Greeks wrote about the Stone Age people they encountered when they arrived in Europe. When civilization reached Scandinavia a few centuries after that, the Norsemen wrote about the neighboring Finnic tribes. There's no shortage of data about the religions of Stone Age people.
So fear in a nonexistant creature allowed man to...settle from transient hunter-gatherers to farmers and herdsman giving birth to science and thus atheism? Is that irony?
The only catalyst I find for the Agricultural Revolution was the self-domestication of the dog. Humans had been living in small extended-family clans of nomads for hundreds of thousands of years (millions, depending on how you define "human"). They hated other clans because they were perceived as intruders on their precious hunting and gathering territory. Suddenly around 12,000BCE a few brave, curious, tolerant and gregarious wolves decided to move into a human camp because humans leave so much perfectly good food lying on the ground and also because wolf and human hunting skills combined can bring down much more game than either could separately. Humans learned to live in harmony and cooperation with "people" they couldn't even talk to. It must have got them thinking that maybe it would be possible to live in harmony and cooperation with other people. Bingo, a mere two thousand years later they got together with a couple of other clans and became a large enough tribe to establish a village with cultivated crops and domesticated food animals. The first surplus food came into existence and everything else followed naturally due to the division of labor and economies of scale that occur naturally in larger communities.
There's no reason to suspect that this first Paradigm Shift, from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic, had anything to do with gods. Unless you're dyslexic and think that dog = god.
Remove whatever event that caused global fear of an all powerful Form. Do we still get the civilized world? I think that without this preoccupation man would take far longer to civilize. Perhaps even prone to extinction. Who knows.
You are so dead wrong about so many of the things upon which your reasoning is based, that it completely falls apart. Your hypothesis doesn't hold one drop of water. Come back when you've had a few more years of education, okay? Take a class in Jung for non-psychology majors and it will help you understand the origin of religion. Take a class in economics for non-business majors and it will help you understand the origin of civilization.