Fairy followers dont knock on your door to convert you. They dont demand that their pseudoscience be taught in schools. They dont sentence other fairies to death. They dont claim that moral rules come from fairy rituals and that without fairies we would have street sex and the abolition of private property. They dont say that fairies made the world and therefore we should shut our eyes to Big Brother the fairies. They dont say that the fairy will order you to kill your sister if she walks down the street with someone who isnt her brother.
So I think theres what the poet Shelley called the necessity of atheism. Sooner or later youre going to have to take a stand. Either you attribute your presence here to the laws of biology and physics or you attribute it to a divine plan. (You can tell friend from foe by how they answer this inescapable question and how they deal with its implications.) And yet, like believers, once we have made up our minds, we still have much work to do.
Christopher Hitchens, who died in December 2011, guides us through centuries of agnostic and anti-religious thought. The volume includes 45 texts that constitute the canon of atheism. From Lucretius to David Hume, from Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza to Shelley and Karl Marx, and from Darwin and Freud to the younger and more modern militant advocates of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Ian McEwan, and many others. The anthology's enlightening and enjoyable texts, enriched with the excellent comments of Christopher Hitchens, are of interest not only to the atheist, the agnostic, and the pantheist, but also arouse the curiosity of the monotheistic reader.
