王夫之
While in modern history, the Taiping Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, Communist Revolution, and the Cultural Revolution contributed significantly to the rise of irreligion and distrust of organized religion among the general populace; irreligion in its various forms, especially rationalism, secularism, and antitheism, has had a long history in China dating back millennia. The Zhou Dynasty "Classic of Poetry" contains several catechistic poems in the "Decade of Dang" questioning the authority or existence of "Shangdi". Later philosophers such as Xun Zi, Fan Zhen, Han Fei, Zhang Zai, Wang Fuzhi also criticized the religious practices prevalent during their times. Buddhism flourished in China during the Southern and Northern Dynasties Period. It was during this period that Fan Zhen wrote "Shen Mie Lun" (Simplified Chinese 神灭论, Traditional Chinese 神滅論, "On the Annihilation of the Shen") in reaction to Buddhist concepts of body-soul dualism, "samsara" and "karma". He wrote that the soul is merely an effect or function of the body, and that there is no soul without the body (i.e., after the destruction and death of the body). Further, he considered that cause-and-effect relationships claimed to be evidence of "karma" were merely the result of coincidence and bias. For this, he was exiled by the Emperor.