“Holbach’s System of Nature is the most exhaustive [and intellectually thorough-going] discussion of atheism — from a scientific, philosophical, moral, and political perspective — ever written.”

— Sunand Joshi (2014), The Original Atheists (pg. #)

“The first atheist of whom we know is one Diagoras, who lived in the late fifth century BCE. It is typical that nothing of this works aside from random fragments survives and that he was forced to flee Athens because he declared that there were no gods. Even in the ages preceding Christianity, the enunciation of explicit atheistic, or even agnostic, views carried with it the threat of both legal punishment and social obloquy.”

— Sunand Joshi (2014), The Original Atheists (pg. 7) [3]

“There is scarcely any question that the revolutionary findings of such thinkers as Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had the effect of knocking the earth and its occupants from both the physical and moral centrality in the universe.”

— Sunand Joshi (2014), The Original Atheists (pg. 7) [3]