With a PoD of 380CE (after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire), how plausible and how early could a Deist or Atheist Revolution take place in Europe?
Partially happened with the French Revolution but didn't get too popular outside some radical political circles.With a PoD of 380CE (after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire), how plausible and how early could a Deist or Atheist Revolution take place in Europe?
IOTL, the dominant Roman Catholic Church's power and holdings was broken up by the Protestant Reformation.
Instead of a movement to reform Christianity, perhaps some kind of Atheist Martin Luther comes about and says that Christianity is all made up bunk like Paganism before it? And then rulers in Europe rally behind Atheist Luther to break the hold of the Church and confiscate Church lands?
I mainly agree with the "ridiculously OP Revolutionary France" scenario but for the sake of argument could a more powerful strain of Gnostic thought accomplish the AHC in a roundabout way? If some form of Gnostic Christianity becomes the dominant faith in early the Roman Empire, then the antimaterialism of the faith could eventually produce a backlash. Rather than seeing all of the material world as a disgusting encumbrance, the newly arising Deists would celebrate it as a masterpiece of craftsmanship by a hands off landlord, which would no doubt appeal to the run of the mill peasant whose entire life revolves around the ins and outs of material existence and would have no time for the extreme asceticism and borderline antinatalism that the most extreme variants of Gnosticism could produce. An atheist revolution is a harder lift though.
What about the Russian Revolution? That's after 380 CE.
I don't think so. Not related to this thread even then. Communism has never achieved an intellectual and a developmental progress as the OP wants. For such process to occur,only way is relative stability.Also after 1900 though. Communist revolutions do have potential though; if you both wank the Paris Commune and make it more antireligious.
Communist Europe and North Korea were/are very stable countries (China perhaps not so much at times) and some like Albania had huge drops in religious populations for a time. The USSR did too until the government scaled back some of it in an attempt to raise morale against the Nazis. Given the pseudoreligious tendencies of communism, an antireligious campaign can absolutely work assuming the state apparatus is strong and dedicated enough. Not necessarily atheism either since they could end up promoting a more deist philosophy instead assuming the party wants to keep "religion" around. Some elements in the CPSU wanted something like this, and of course the French Revolution went for that too.I don't think so. Not related to this thread even then. Communism has never achieved an intellectual and a developmental progress as the OP wants. For such process to occur,only way is relative stability.