God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens

This huge and terrible industry was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest. (Its counterpart, the slave trade in the Mediterranean and North Africa, was explicitly endorsed by, and carried out in the name of, Islam.)

Douglass was somewhat ambivalent about religion, noting in his Autiobiography that the most devout Christians made the most savage slaveholders.

to believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

“red heifer” mentioned in the book of Numbers, chapter 19, which if slaughtered again according to the exact and meticulous ritual will

Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.

One of America’s most seminal books is William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience,

Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and two from the neuroscientist Sam Harris.