"All new ideas pass through three stages: first they are dismissed as nonsense, then they are rejected as being against religion and finally they are acknowledged as the truth, with the proviso from the initial opponents that they knew it all along."

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To a child who dies, and to the parents of this child, will you speak, if religion consoles them, in praise of atheism? That one does not mistake: that, to my mind, does not prove anything against atheism and much against religion. "The heart of a heartless world, said Marx, the soul of soulless conditions." It is misery that makes religion, and it is why this one is miserable. Who would prohibit opium to a dying man? And what are we, out of oblivion or entertainment, anything else but dying?

— Andre Comte-Sponville