France once said, "Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest," and "Religion has done love a great service by making it a sin."

Hitchens says, "I'm an atheist. I'm not neutral about religion, I'm hostile to it. I think it is a positively bad idea, not just a false one. And I mean not just organized religion, but religious belief itself."

Even the “Catholic Encyclopedia” can claim only that "his religion is scarcely more than that of a spiritually-minded pagan."

Hobbes opposed any positive revealed religion, including Christianity and he was neither the first nor the last freethinker to hide the light of skepticism under the bushel of belief.

Burroughs wrote, "Of the hereafter I have no conception. This life is enough for me" and "Our civilization is not founded upon Christianity; it is founded upon reason and science."

"Civilization will not attain to its perfection," wrote Zola, "until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest."

“I was never a believer, but after seeing Czech Catholics persecuted during the Stalinist terror, I felt the deepest solidarity with them. What separated us, the belief in God, was secondary to what united us.”

"Paradise is one of the crass fictions invented by high-priests and fathers of the Church, a fiction whose purpose is to requite the hellish torments of people on earth with the soap-bubble of a hope of peace in another place."

“One of the things that is wrong with religion is that it teaches us to be satisfied with answers which are not really answers at all.”

“Bigger things than the state will fall ... all religion will fall,” wrote Ibsen. His play, “The Emperor and the Galilean,” shows the superiority of paganism to Christianity.