JE>>The crucial division between religious faith and world-view is that the
>>first is obviously a 'leap of faith' lacking a firm foundation in anything
>>observed, possibly inculcated by cultural stuff, or possibly self-derived...
>This is obvously the view of a modern materialist (no insult intended).
>If you had asked just about anyone previous to a few hundred years ago,
>they would simply not have understood what you meant.
Untrue. William of Occam by means of his razor concluded that belief in such truths like the Resurrection could only be sustained by faith. Others felt the need to provide independent proof that the Scriptures are True - one such argument (given by Dante) runs that if the Scriptures weren't True, then how could Christianity spread with the speed that it did*?
*Obviously Dante wasn't familiar with the early spread of Islam but I digress...
>Modern materialist atheism was littleraly inconcievable.
If it was inconcievable how come it was a crime in Ancient Athens? In India, there were materialist philosophers known as the Ajivakas who are probably the RW inspiration for the Lunar materialists. In China, Confucian thought was agnostic with respect to the Other Side - so much so that China was held up as a paragon of Rationality in the Age of Reason (the practice of Taoism was unknown in Europe in those days).
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