Javali (Extracted from Ramayana, the sacred poem within the Rigveda, the Hindu scriptures of about 1500BC)

" . . . there is no after-world, nor any religious practice for attaining that. . . . [Religious] injunctions . . . have been laid down in the [scriptures] by clever people, just to rule over [other] people."

[Ed This is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable comments I have read. The Hindu sceptical tradition is something that didn't register with me when I first read parts of the Rigveda as a young man. Even though I was then assiduously searching for answers to big questions I somehow missed this aspect of Hinduism and it took the better part of a lifetime to discover for myself that organised religions are no more than other forms of political organisations in which ambitious individuals seek to impress, and then subsequently oppress and suppress their members. The above passage comes from a review by Shashi Tharoor in The Washington Post of Amartya Sen's recent book, The Argumentative Indian. (Amartya Sen is, of course, one of the world's leading economists and won the Nobel Prize in 1998.) Shashi Tharoo writes later in the review that at the time the Rigveda was written "most Europeans were clad in animal skins". That may have been so in much of Europe but I have to report that in England and the north of Scotland at that time (when the weather was mild due to the absence of an Arctic ice cap) we were building accurate solar observatories and our homes had internal flushable toilets. But, never mind, we obviously didn't get things quite right in the Bronze Age because Europe became prey to an intolerant religion in later millenia which India (and China) managed to avoid.].