Even Atheists Still Set Up Christmas Trees, by David Carlin

By David Carlin, The Catholic Thing, Dec. 22, 2023

David Carlin is a retired professor of sociology and philosophy at the Community College of Rhode Island, and the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America, Three Sexual Revolutions: Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, and most recently Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church.

According to the ancient Greeks, the differentia between gods and men is that the former are immortal, the latter mortal.  This belief in human mortality, it should be noted, was not incompatible with another widely held belief, namely that the souls (or ghosts) of dead humans live a miserable underworld life in Hades.  But this “life” was hardly entitled to be called living.  It was the antithesis of immortality.  Only the gods were truly immortal.

In time, however, certain teachers came along – the Orphics, the Pythagoreans, Socrates, Plato, and others – who held that human souls too are immortal, or at least are capable of immortality.  But given that immortality was the distinctive privilege of the gods, this was tantamount to saying that human souls are godlike; they’re actual or at least potential gods. ….

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