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Talk:Theodorus the Atheist

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Category Atheist

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Just to clarify this point, so that we don't have to fight an edit war with our anonymous IP friend. It's certainly true that we are lacking precise information on Theodorus's philosophical views concerning god or the gods. But he was certainly deemed an atheist of one sort or another in the ancient world, even if it was merely denying "the existence of the deities of popular belief". Category:Atheist philosophers is a valid category for Theodorus - one can argue that he doesn't fully fit in the category by some definitions, but anyone who has spent time categorising people on Wikipedia will know that it's constantly the case that people rarely fit perfectly into categories. In this case though I don't think it's remotely controversial to call Theodorus an "Atheist philosopher". Pasicles (talk) 16:40, 3 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Whose authority?

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The charge of atheism is sustained by the popular designation of Atheus, by the authority of...

There follows a list of authors with primary source citations that are contrasted with Clement of Alexandria (also a primary source citation). I was going to reword it on the assumption that the editor had merely located the term athoes or atheus in the writers mentioned, which would be OR. But I'm not sure that is what is meant. We certainly cannot decide that the writers are opposite Clement by checking if other sources use a word (atheist) that they might have used to describe him even if Clement were right. But I'm not checking the sources myself and so I won't fix the wording and possibly render it false. It needs secondary sources. Srnec (talk) 00:24, 19 July 2022 (UTC)[reply]