It still does today, too.

Thanks for the heads up! Fixed

You probably already know about it, you might just not know that you know about it.

The core of the Gospel of Thomas is pretty clearly a response to Lucretius which then used Platonist concepts of the demiurge and eikons (essentially archetypes) to build on top of the Epicurean foundations regarding a belief in a physical body that would die and a mind/soul that would die with it.

You can see how the Naassenes by the 4th century are still interpreting the seeds parables using the language of Lucretius’s indivisible seeds (writing in Latin he used ‘seed’ in place of the Greek atomos), while at the same time talking about the original man creating the son of man and then likening their ontological beliefs to the Phrygian mysteries around spontaneous first beings described as coming to exist like a tumor.

Saying 29 of Thomas even straight up calls the notion of the spirit arising from flesh (Lucretius’s evolution) to be a greater wonder than flesh arising from spirit (intelligent design) before criticizing the notion of the dependence of the spirit on the physical body in either.

If you want to look into this more, I recommend reading the following texts in parallel with each other:

• Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (50 BCE)
• Unknown, Gospel of Thomas (~50 to ~350 CE)
• Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of all Heresies book 5 (3rd century CE)

Adding Lucretius into the mix as you look at the other two works will be the biggest “ah ha” you could probably have when interpreting Thomas and remnant beliefs preserved among the Naassenes. In particular, pay close attention to sayings 7, 8, 9 for a surprise, noting that 8 is the only saying after another beginning with a conjunction and that in both the parallel metaphors of Habakkuk 1 and Matthew 13 a human is a fish and not the fisherman.

Based on the anecdote of Socrates and the Pythia, that makes you one of the wisest people in this conversation.

since atheist believes that gods don’t exist

This is a common misconception.

Theist is someone who believes God(s) exist(s).

An atheist is someone who does not believe God exists. They don’t need to have a positive belief of nonexistence of God.

Much like how a gnostic is someone who believes there is knowledge of the topic.

And an agnostic is someone who believes either they don’t have that knowledge or that the knowledge doesn’t exist.

So you could be an agnostic atheist (“I don’t know and I don’t believe either way in the absence of knowledge”) or an agnostic atheist (“I don’t know but I believe anyways”) or a gnostic atheist (“I know that they don’t and because I know I don’t believe”) or a gnostic theist (“I know they do and I believe because I know”).

Epicurus would have been an Agnostic atheist if we were categorizing. They ended up right about so much because they were so committed to not ruling anything out. They even propose that there might be different rules for different versions of parallel universes (they thought both time and matter were infinite so there were infinite worlds). It’s entirely plausible he would have argued for both the existence and nonexistence of gods in different variations of existence given how committed they were to this notion of not ruling anything out.

But it’s pretty clear from the collection of his beliefs that the notion of a god as either creator or overseer of this universe was not actively believed in outside of the lip service that essentially “yeah, sure, there’s gods in between the fabric of existence, but not in it.”

The Epicurean philosophy itself was very focused on the idea that the very notion of gods was making everyone sick, and that they offered their ‘cure’ for people to stop giving a crap about what gods might think or do.

You’re getting too caught up in one particular concept of ‘God’ (why is it a ‘he’ even?).

Epicurus wasn’t Christian. Jesus doesn’t even come along until centuries later.

There are theological configurations in antiquity very different from the OT/NT depictions of divinity which still have a ‘good’ deity, but where it is much harder to dispute using the paradox.

For example, there was a Christian apocryphal sect that claimed there was an original humanity evolved (Epicurus’s less talked about contribution to thinking in antiquity) from chaos which preceded and brought about God before dying, and that we’re the recreations of that original humanity in the archetypes of the originals, but with the additional unconditional capacity to continue on after death (their concept of this God is effectively all powerful relative to what it creates but not what came before it).

If we consider a God who is bringing back an extinct species by recreating their environment and giving them the ability to self-define and self-determine, would it be more ethical to whitewash history such that the poor and downtrodden are unrepresented in the sample or to accurately recreate the chaotic and sometimes awful conditions of reality such that even the unfortunate have access to an afterlife and it is not simply granted to the privileged?

The Epicurian paradox is effective for the OT/NT concepts of God with absolute mortality and a narcissistic streak, and for Greek deities viewed as a collective, and a number of other notions of the divine.

But it’s not quite as broadly applicable as it is often characterized, especially when dealing with traditions structured around relative mortalities and unconditionally accepted self-determination as the point of existence.

Really more an atheist.

Don’t forget that not long before him Socrates was murdered by the state on the charge of impiety.

Plato in Timeaus refuses to even entertain a rejection of intelligent design “because it’s impious.”

By the time of Lucretius, Epicureanism is very much rejecting intelligent design but does so while acknowledging the existence of the gods, despite having effectively completely removed them from the picture.

It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds, but the Epicurean cosmology does not depend on the existence of gods at all, and you even see things like eventually Epicurus’s name becoming synonymous with atheism in Judea.

He is probably best described as a closeted atheist at a time when being one openly was still too dangerous.

The problem with the argument is that evil is relative, and the relative knowledge of what is or isn’t is something subjectively decided, not something inherently known.

Counterpoint - men need to be less hung up on gender.

There’s plenty of liberal spaces for people even if not exclusively for men.

As a guy, I don’t need a sign outside saying “Open for men” to know I can go into a store, just “Open” suffices.

While there are aspects of my life that are informed by my biology and its social construct, it’s one of the least defining aspects of who I am as a person. I don’t need it specially recognized.

I’d much rather live in a world where there’s spaces for “people who like RPGs and fantasy” or “people who like tech” over “people who identify as male.” I have a ton in common with the former two, irrespective of gender identities, and very little in common with the latter other than fairly superficial things.

“Hey, pee standing up? Me too! We have so much in common we should be friends. Oh, you want to meet up at the bar to watch the latest hockey game? Yeah, that sounds…fun…”

The very idea of a “liberal space for men” is antithetical to my sense of liberalism. We should be liberated from arbitrary notions of identity, not reinforced into them.

While this is true, it’s also true that pendulum swings can go further in the opposite direction than equality.

While a trite example, in the recent Barbie film, at the end when things are going back to the seemingly good way, the men in Barbieland ask if they can have a seat on the supreme court and are told no, which is then explained as Barbieland being a mirror to the real world such that as there’s increased equality in the real world then equality for men in the mirror would increase.

Apparently the writers weren’t familiar with the fact there’s four women on the supreme court right now and a woman has been on the court since 1981 (around twice as close to the creation of Barbie than to the present day).

Even in the context of its justifiably imbalanced equality it failed to be proportionally imbalanced.

There’s interesting research around how the privileged underestimate the degree to which the good things that happen to them are because of privilege, but that at the same time the underprivileged overestimate how often the bad things which happen are because of bias. In theory both are ego-preserving adaptations. But it also means that either side is going to have a difficult time correctly identifying equality from their relative subjective perspectives.