Quote - If the earlier date takes precedence, then which incarnation of a supreme being is supposed to be disproved? Roman deities were preceded by Greek, Greek by Egyptian, Egyptian by Minoan, Minoan by Babylonian... and that's as far back as I've read. This, of course, doesn't take into account far Eastern religions. And that's only the organized ones.

Disproving something presents a problem. Take, for example, disproving the existence of Minotaurs. You could prove they did exist by finding remains, but, because you haven't found any, you can't definitively say they did or did not exist. That's why religion stresses 'faith' and not 'proof'.

That's why I, unlike some posters in this thread, never felt god actually has been disproved.  I don't take very much of the bible literally, I'm just open to the idea of a divine influence guiding what was written and also what was later chosen for canon.

Those other gods weren't exactly disproved either, but other belief systems came along that met the emotional/spiritual needs of the people better and so they moved on.  Who can even say if the people of those times even believed in their own gods any more than we (devout and atheist alike) often still hold onto figures such as Santa Claus while admitting that we no longer believe in his factual existence.  I don't personally use faith as a substitute for science, though many older cultures may have needed to.

All of this takes me back to some stuff I read years ago that posited that the bicameral mind was a fairly new adaptation in humans.  According to the writer, people just a few thousand years ago had much more communication between the hemispheres of their brains than we do now, causing both real events to often be described fantastically, with dreams and visions often being treated as real and literal events.  The researcher went on to compare religious writings of antiquity to the writings of schizophrenics and people on hallucinogens, noting many interesting similarities.  Even Joseph Campbell once remarked that western civilization was the first to insist that it's mythological truths also needed to be facts, and I can't help but thinking that's a huge factor in the way atheists and theists have often viewed one another, especially in the last few hundred years.

This is also why I don't think older religions can easily be disproved by science.  People recorded things for effect, not always for historical accuracy;  An army of hundreds might have been described as being an army of thousands.  A tribe that was 7 feet tall may have been recorded as having been 20 feet tall.  Those things don't necessarily make the stories less useful for illustrating moral points or lessons, but they do make them less than desirable sources of factual information.  In order to disprove a religious text, it would first be necessary to separate the history from the prophecy, the simile from the hyperbole, and the bread and wine from the body and the blood.  History shows us that this is almost impossibly difficult among even those that agree on the alleged divinity of the texts, I don't know if it would be an easier task for a neutral non-believer to do or not.