I'm just reading Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great - How religion poisons everything, a lucid and condensed evaluation of Islam. You can join me by listening to chapter 9 in the above clip.
As Hitchens wrote, "One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody — not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms — had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think — though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one — that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell."
To give you a taste of what awaits you, here's an excerpt.
And this quote from Heinrich Heine, someone closer to my heart, in his "Gedanken und Einfälle": "In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides."
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology. Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.
