Religious Beliefs Of Al-Razi
This is what Ar-Razi once wrote. You decide whether he was athiest or not. “The prophets-these billy goats with long beards, as al-Razi disdainfully describes them-cannot claim any intellectual or spiritual superiority. These billy goats pretend to come with a message from God, all the while exhausting themselves 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 Koran, the New Testament. As for the Koran, 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 blindly follow their religious leaders. 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 round the religious leaders are either feeble-minded, or they are women and adolescents. Religion stifles truth and fosters enmity. If a book in itself can constitute a demonstration that it is true revelation, the treatises of geometry, astronomy, medicine and logic can justify such a claim much better than the Quran, the transcendent literary beauty of which, denied by al-Razi, was thought by orthodox Muslims to prove the truth of Muhammad’s mission.”