God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens

Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterwork Leviathan. I strongly recommend that you read part III, chapter 38, and part IV, chapter 44, for yourselves, because Hobbes’s command of both holy scripture and the English language is quite breathtaking.

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.

I do not know for certain about death and the gods—but I am as certain as I can be that you do not know, either.

Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.

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

religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.”