Atheisms best most enduring arguments ironically have their earliest expression in the Hebrew Tanakh, whence they were the basis for both Byzantine iconoclasm and Islams Hadith prohibiting images of living things. Biblical writers scathingly condemn pagan worship of fabricated idols without motion, speech or action, instead asserting a Creator of materials and craftsmen alike. In the same vein, biblical scribes repeatedly repudiate then popular notions of divinity limited to local power, arguing any genuine deity must have equal power in all places. It is thus easy to view contemporary atheism as the most developed form of rejecting gods made in mans image, which has an ancient and proud pedigree in Western civilization all the way back to the Abrahamic religions founding scriptures.

In an infamous case, the prophet Elijah is depicted challenging the priests of Baal to a "miracle-off:" Both sides would build an altar, fill it with sacrifices and pray for fire from heaven to consume it; the god who answered would be recognized as divine and the other rejected, with his priests summarily executed for blasphemy. The text relates that while the Baalites made increasingly frantic but ever fruitless pleas heavenward, Elijah sarcastically mocked them by telling them to pray louder, in case Baal was asleep, or on vacation, or "indisposed." Afterward, the narrative states he uttered his own prayer, immediately answered by fire from the sky consuming the sacrifice (and altar, and water that had been dumped on the sacrifice until it filled a surrounding trench; biblical scribes had no truck with equivocation. ) The better known deuterocanonical story of Bel and the Dragon is similar: The Babylonian king is said to affirm Bel as a god because its food and drink offerings are consumed daily; the prophet Daniel then demonstrates Bel does nothing of the sort, but is only a dead statue.

The dynamic recurs throughout the Old and New Testaments (in the first chapter of Romans, Paul reiterates it with his customary rigor and harshness) and is thus integral to the Western world, yet similarly significant and seminal Eastern examples are hard to find. Iconoclasm as such is not only common but sometimes pathological in the West and Mid-East (the latter is more truly Western than Eastern in the modern era, despite widely professed hatred for the West.) Again, the eponymous Orthodox case may be the most pivotal historical example, but Islam has its own, made notorious by the recent controversy over drawings of Mohammed.

In the Americas and Western Europe such fanaticism seems incomprehensible, but that mainly reflects a more recent tradition of pagan symbolism in those areas than in the Mid-East that first assaulted it. Incorporating pagan deities as Catholic saints rather than attacking them as idols was vital to Christianitys spread throughout both Western Europe and the New World, so iconoclasm has less orthodoxy. The irreparable damage it inflicted in the Great Schism makes more sense on that basis. The Roman Catholic Church would have been naturally reluctant to surrender a missionary tool indispensable in Early Medieval northern and western Europe. Yet what made it appealing in the West (pagan polytheism) was already largely absent Asia Minor, so the value was not only minor, but offensive, as an accomodation of paganism. It is certainly easy to imagine the same fervor and absolutism atheism affirms, on grounds of the same negative evidence, growing into similar fanaticism.

One sidebar: The Pentateuchs "I am 'I AM'" is also a strikingly advanced ontological statement for its era. It always interests me to see the bible present counter-arguments to atheism hundreds, if not thousands, of years before they would receive any response except, "wait... you're saying there are people who do not believe in ANY god?! " For ignorant primitives there is a lot of rather sophisticated "modern" thought in those old texts. On the other hand, some philosopher I read somewhere claimed there is nothing new under the sun. Note: NOT trying to proselytize; just thought it might make an interesting discussion.