Atheism in Brazil

Definition

Atheism should be located at the heart of a long philosophical tradition in the West that seeks to define disbelief in its various forms. Agnosticism, skepticism, pantheism, and deism were the terms created since the eighteenth century to designate them (Minois 2012). Understood as a social scourge and used frequently as an insult in religious debates of the sixteenth century, atheism as a free and personal choice is a more recent concept. As a materialist vision of the world, it depended highly on scientific advances. Only in the nineteenth century did atheism emerge as a form of publicly declared disbelief. An inheritance of anticlericalism in postrevolutionary France, it was organized in civil associations of free thinkers engaged in a war against religion and in philosophical systems dedicated to organizing a world view based on the premise of the inexistence of god.

Introduction

Brazil has no historiography dedicated to the theme of disbelief. Although the country...