Zakaria Razi
"All men are by nature equal and equally endowed with the faculty of reason
that must not be disparaged in favor of blind faith; reason further enables men to perceive scientific truths in an immediate way. The prophets these billy goats with long beards cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. These billy goats pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves in spouting their lies, and imposing on the masses blind obedience to the "words of the master." The miracles of the prophets are impostures, based on trickery, or the stories regarding them are lies.
The falseness of what all the prophets say is evident in the fact that they contradict one another: one affirms what the other denies, and yet each claims to be the sole depository of the truth; thus the New Testament contradicts the Torah, the Qu'ran the New Testament.
As for the Qur'an, it is but an assorted mixture of absurd and inconsistent
fables, which has ridiculously been judged inimitable, when, in fact, its
language, style, and its much-vaunted eloquence are far from being faultless.
Custom, tradition, and intellectual laziness lead men to follow their religious
leaders blindly.
Religions have been the sole cause of the bloody wars that have ravaged mankind. Religions have also been resolutely hostile to philosophical
speculation and to scientific research. The so-called holy scriptures are
worthless and have done more harm than good, whereas the writings of the
ancients like Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Hippocrates have rendered much
greater service to humanity.
The people who gather around the religious leaders are either feeble-minded, or
they are women and adolescents (suggestible). Religion stifles the truth and fosters
enmity. If a book in itself constitutes a demonstration that it is a true revelation, the treatises of geometry, astronomy, medicine and logic can justify such a claim much better than the Qur'an