A Portable Atheist by Christopher Hitchens...

I have just read the introduction of this book on line and already I want it!!!

Quote from Christopher Hitchens book, "The Portable Atheist".

1. From De Rerum Natura (On the nature of things).
In January 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote John Adams to "encourage a hope that the human mind will some day get back to the freedom it enjoyed 2000 years ago".
This wish for a return to the era of 'Philosophy', would put Jefferson in the same period as 'Titus Lucretius Carcus', thanks to whose six-volume poem Dr Rerum Naturum (On The Nature of Things) we have a distillation of the work of the first true materialists: Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus. These men concluded that the world was composed of atoms in perpetual motion, and Epicurus, in particular, went on to argue that the gods, if they existed, played no part in human affairs. It followed that events like 'Thunderstorms were natural and not supernatural, that ceremonies of worship and propitiation were a waste of time, and that there was nothing to be feared in death.