2000 years of disbelief

by James A. Haught

Intelligent, educated people tend to be critical of the supernatural and the so-called revealed truths of religion. So it is hardly surprising to find a great number of skeptics and unbelievers among our major inventors, scientists, writers, social reformers, and other world changers - people usually termed great. The advance of Western civilization has been partly a story of the gradual victory over religious oppression, and these brilliant doubters were men and women who didn't pray, didn't kneel at altars, didn't make pilgrimages, and didn't recite creeds. 2,000 years of Disbelief is a book of quotes that brings together the words of the "greats" of both East and West, from antiquity to the present. Included in this stirring collection are such renowned skeptics as Epicurus, Voltaire, Arthur Schopenhauer, Mark Twain, and Bertrand Russell. But also represented are many whose skepticism is not so well known, and who are for this reason regarded by churchmen and others as conventional