The Original Atheists

""This volume is a testament to that courage and to the fact that we modern unbelievers may take pleasure in realizing that we have philosophical and epistemological roots going back centuries.”—American Rationalist“This anthology brilliantly samples the work of the leading thinkers of the European and American Enlightenments that culminated in our era's secular naturalism. Especially relevant are the sections by Locke, Jefferson, and Madison that counter the regressive efforts by today's religious Right to lead us back to the Dark Ages.”—Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty and a columnist for Free Inquiry“Joshi's enlightening The Unbelievers featured his analyses of the defenses of atheism offered by such noted nonbelievers as H. L. Mencken, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others. What has long been missing from the atheist corpus is a compilation of detailed arguments from the earliest writers on the controversial topic: Voltaire, d'Holbach, Bentham, Madison, Jefferson, and Paine. The Original Atheists has now filled this void and, in effect, completed the magnum opus Joshi started in 2011.”—William Harwood, author of God, Jesus and the Bible