atheize

present singular third person atheizes · participle present atheizing · participle past atheized · past atheized

1. raretransitiveTo render (someone) atheistic.

   After this manner, authority vvorking in a circle, they endeavoured to atheize one another.

   1732, George Berkeley, “The Second Dialogue”, in Alciphron: Or, The Minute Philosopher. […], volume I, London: […] J[acob] Tonson […], →OCLC, section XVII, page 118

   3 more examples

   In like manner, it ought not to be predicated of a French party—and of a party comprehending Despresmenil, Bailly, Maury, Mounier—that because one Robinet was suffered to read an impudent atheistical disquisition in a lodge aat Lyons, it is therefore plainly the main object of free-masonry to atheize the universe.

   1798 March, “Robinson’s Proofs of a Conspiracy”, in The Monthly Review, page 307

   There is an element in every State, daily increasing in numerical strength, becoming more emphatic in its utterances, more pronounced in its attitude, whose avowed object is completely to secularize and atheize the state and the nation in all their work and in all their relations to state institutions and individual subjects.

   1878 October, C. H. Payne, quotee, The Ohio Educational Monthly, volume 27, number 10, page 335

   It ought to be added, also, that the theory of providing exclusively secular education by the State exerts a most unfavorable influence upon our youth, tending to demoralize and atheize them.

   1880 April, C. H. Payne, “Shall State Education be Exclusively Secular?”, in Methodist Quarterly Review, page 310

2. intransitiverareTo become atheistic.

   A considerable observation of Plato's, that it is not only moral vitiosity, which inclines men to atheize, but also an affectation of seeming wiser than the generality of mankind; […]

   1678, Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe