Modern atheism in China has borrowed heavily from the west and the Soviet Union, with little historical continuity of Chinese traditional thought. In the first half of the twentieth century, modernists were predominantly secularists who advocated replacing religion with science, aesthetics, or philosophy. In the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1949, Chinese Marxist–Leninist atheism has developed into two distinct versions – enlightenment atheism and militant atheism – which have very different policy implications. In the first thirty years of the PRC, militant atheism dominated and climaxed in the eradication of religion. In the era of economic reforms and opening up to the outside world, enlightenment atheism provided the ideological basis for limited tolerance of religion.

This chapter surveys phenomena and trajectories related to atheism, doubt, and freethought in the medieval Islamic world. Since the existence of God was thought to be rationally proven by both Muslim philosophers and theologians alike, there were next to no Muslims that came to espouse atheism in the Middle Ages. However, there were a number of authors and scholars – some of them highly influential – who can be called freethinkers, though no such term existed in the Arabic or Persian of the time. Similar to their seventeenth-century European counterparts, the medieval Muslim freethinkers held that arguments and positions about truths should be based on reason and demonstrative argumentation rather than revelation and tradition. Some of them directed venomous criticism against prophecy and the Quran, which they all but rejected. Perhaps surprisingly, many of the works (or citations of them) of the medieval Muslim critics of religion have survived to this day.

“Existence precedes essence.” The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would use this phrase to characterize existentialism and limit the extension of the term in his essay “Existentialism is a humanism,” which was first published in 1946. He had already used the phrase in his major work Being and Nothingness, originally published in 1943, but it is in the later work that he would use it to define the “movement.” This proposition is less of a doctrinal statement then it is a characterization of a way of thinking or of an attitude toward life.

“La mort est un repos éternel.” Death is but an eternal sleep. These words were posted in every cemetery of the city of Nevers by order of Joseph Fouché, the Représentant-en-mission assigned to the department of Nièvre in central France on 10 October 1793. Never before had such a clearly atheist statement been made publicly by a member of the French government. The inhabitants of two villages on the outskirts of Paris, Ris and Mennecy, followed suit, declaring to the Convention, on 30 October, that they were renouncing the Catholic faith. Three weeks earlier, on 5 October, the Convention had adopted a new calendar cleansed of any reference to Christianity; the starting point was no longer the birth of Christ but the founding of the first Republic on 22 September 1792. Months were divided into three ten-day units, the decades, the tenth day, the decadi, substituting for Sunday.

Commentators in the nation’s newspapers foresaw impending doom. In the United States, as well as across the Atlantic, a frightening intellectual movement was gaining steam in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The movement supposedly portended the end of Christianity, morality, and civil society. Writing in the Chicago Tribune (1870), one commentator chided the “moral weakness” of the movement, which embraced “mere facts without faiths or fancies, mere knowledge without affection of imagination, and mere science without worship or inspiration.” In 1877, a commentator for the Weekly Tribune in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, saw in the movement a “bigotry” and “hostility” to life that revealed its hollow core. In 1889, the Pittsburgh Dispatch quoted the Archbishop of New York on the dreadful danger of this movement: “What will human life be in this world? What will become of the family? What of civil society itself?”

Grotius’ earlier theological controversies concerned the authority of secular rulers and the normative status of the undivided church, principles given fullest exposition in De Imperio Summarum Potestatum. Meletius reveals deeper disagreements with the prevailing Calvinism, insisting on the distinction of core doctrines from theological speculations. The atoning death of Christ, expounded in De Satisfactione Christi, was of central importance to him, and his apologetic interest flowered in De Veritate Christianae Religionis, an exercise in natural theology. The later writings centre on his Bible Commentary and his writings on Christian unity. They reveal some changes upon earlier views, but no accommodation to Catholic doctrinal norms. The polemics with Rivet sharpened his opposition to Calvinism as a dogmatic system with an inadequate conception of the Christian moral life. His status as a layman of no church establishment exposed him to appropriation in support of later agenda that were not his. But his influence was widespread in later Protestantism of many strands.

What is the legacy of Grotius’ doctrinal efforts, and how did they impact on current structures of international law? Was he providing a natural law foundation for the global order, or rather an instrument of power for sovereigns to assert their political and commercial dominion over the world?

Recent studies have observed that in Grotius’ legal doctrine the intellectual ambition to create a universal rule of law (natural law) coexists with a distinctively ‘modern’ use of the vocabulary of individual rights (natural rights). In this chapter, I argue that a more careful reading of Grotius’ engagement with the Aristotelian tradition might cast new light on this traditional dichotomy, and expand our understanding of Grotius’ theory of justice. Famously, Grotius relies on the Aristotelian notion of virtue ethics to introduce the concept of aptitude, which designs a more generic account of merit and moral fitness rather than a strict, enforceable legal claim. Far from being discarded as a ‘minor’ or ‘deficient’ source of right, aptitude plays a fundamental role in this context. Through his reading and translating of the Aristotelian commentator Michael of Ephesus, I will show how Grotius’ thin conception of right as aptitude and fitness provides his natural law doctrine with a heuristic requirement for right reason.

In De jure belli ac pacis, Grotius constructs international law with the vocabulary of private law. For this purpose, he uses distinctions from the Institutes of Justinian and the Digest, but redefines key concepts of Roman law, such as natural law or law of nations (jus gentium). In doing so, he uses a method that is typical for humanist jurisprudence. On the one hand, he describes history, on the other hand, he renews the traditional system of law and adapts the law to the needs of his own day and age.

In his list of synonyms for a godless man, átheos, Iulius Pollux enumerates as diverse characterizations someone who is impious, asebés, or accursed, enagés, someone who hates the gods, misótheos, or is hated by the gods, theomisés, someone who is impure or uninitiated, bébelos, or lawless, athémitos. For godlessness, atheótes, he has unholyness, anosiótes, or indifference towards the divine, oligoría peri to theion. Pollux (around AD 135–93) held the chair of rhetoric in Athens and was part of the so-called Second Sophistic, an intellectual movement in the second century AD that sought to create a kind of renaissance of the classic, especially Athenian, culture from the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

The Scientific Revolution is conveniently dated from 1543, when the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), in which he argued that the Earth goes around the Sun rather than the Sun around the Earth – the “heliocentric” picture of the universe from the “geocentric” picture of the universe (Kuhn 1957). It is as conveniently dated to 1687, when the English mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) which, thanks to his three laws of motion and his law of gravitational attraction, gave the all-important causal explanation to what the Revolution had wrought (Westfall 1971, 1980)

Unbelief in God is a normal position, and atheism is a relatively accepted – though not extremely popular – identification in northern Europe. Most of northern Europe has historically been dominated by Protestant Churches, and in many countries the relationship between church and state has been very close. Variants of Christianity have played a significant role in the formation of national identities, although not equally for each northern European nation. The aim of this chapter is to explore Nordic and Baltic countries to make sense of the peculiarities of these areas and nations in an international comparison. This chapter will use the terms ‘Nordic’ and ‘Baltic’, the first referring to five countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden – and the second to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. In our use, ‘Scandinavia’ is a narrower term than ‘Nordic’, and includes Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

To the casual observer who knows some art history, goes to established art museums, and reads fine arts publications, it surely seems that the visual arts have become much less religious over time. From the ancient Sumerians to the Renaissance, art was filled with religious content and displayed in religious contexts. But from the Enlightenment to twentieth-century modernism, artwork with religious content seems to have become increasingly rare, and only atypically exhibited in religious settings or serving religious functions. Contemporary postmodern art, if it has any religious content or function at all, is almost certain to be transgressive rather than a sincere expression of religious belief.

The modern word ‘atheist’ derives from ancient Greek – theos means ‘god’, and the prefix a- denotes absence. The word atheos is first encountered in poetic texts of the fifth century BC, where it means something like ‘god-forsaken’ or ‘impious’, and is used of those who are thought to be uncivilized or in some other way beyond the pale. For example, in Aeschylus’ earliest surviving play, Persians (472 BC), the defeat of Xerxes’ army is said to be requital for ‘their outrageous actions and godless (atheos) arrogance’ (808). In later Greek literature, however, particularly in prose texts, the word took on an additional meaning close to the modern one – that is, ‘lacking in belief in the gods’.

This chapter examines several elements of Grotius’s teachings on the laws governing promises, contracts, and treaties, as expounded in his De jure belli acpacis. Grotius distinguished between promises and contracts. A promise to transfer a property right is binding when the promisor expressed his intention with an external sign, and the promisee has accepted the promise. As the binding effect is based on the free will of the promisor, the so-called vices of the will (duress, fraud etc.) can invalidate the agreement.