“Fairy followers do not knock on your door to convert you. They do not demand that their pseudoscience be taught in schools. They do not condemn followers of other fairies to death. They do not claim that moral rules stem from fairy rituals and that without fairies we would have orgies in the streets, as well as the abolition of private property. They do not say that fairies created the world and therefore we must bend the knee to the Great Brother of the fairies. Nor do they say that a fairy will command you to kill your sister if they see her walking in public with someone who is not her brother.

Therefore, I believe what the poet Shelley called the necessity of atheism holds true. Sooner or later, you must take a stand. Either you attribute your presence here to the laws of biology and physics, or you attribute it to a divine plan. (You can distinguish friend from foe by how they respond to this unavoidable question and how they handle its implications.) However, just like the believers, once we make our decision, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

Christopher Hitchens, who died in December 2011, guides us through the agnostic and anti-religious thought of many centuries. This volume contains 53 texts - some of which are unpublished - that constitute the canon of atheism, from Lucretius to David Hume, from Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza to Shelley and Karl Marx, and from Darwin and Freud to the more recent and contemporary militant advocates of atheism, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Ian McEwan, and many others.

The enlightening yet enjoyable texts of the anthology, enriched with Christopher Hitchens' remarkable commentary, interest not only the atheist, the agnostic, and the pantheist, but also pique the curiosity of the monotheistic reader.