'The Art of Happiness' by Epicurus

I have been getting quite impatient with the Qur'an (because it's tedious drivel), so have taken a break from it to read the extant writings of Epicurus, who lived 341-271 BCE. The religion he founded, Epicureanism, is like Hellenism's equivalent to Buddhism. Sort of. Maybe. Here are some of the things he says:

'The blessed and indestructible being of the divine has no concerns of its own, nor does it make trouble for others. It is not affected by feelings of anger or benevolence, because these are found where there is lack of strength.'

'Death means nothing to us, because that which has been broken down into atoms has no sensation and that which has no sensation is no concern of ours. It is possible to get protection from other things, but when it comes to death, all us humans live in a city without walls. We must try to make the latter part of the journey better than the first; and when we reach the end, we must keep an even keel and remain cheerful.'

'We are born once. We cannot be born a second time, and throughout eternity we shall of necessity no longer exist. You have no power over the morrow, and yet you put off your pleasure. Life is ruined by procrastination, and every one of us dies deep in his affairs.'

'Of all the things that wisdom provides for the happiness of the whole man, by far the most important is the acquisition of friendship. Every friendship is desirable for itself, but it has its origin in personal advantage. Friendship dances around the world, summoning every one of us to the gospel of the happy life.'

'Some desires are (1) natural and necessary, others (2) natural but not necessary, still others (3) neither natural nor necessary but generated by senseless whims. No pleasure is bad in itself, but the things which make for pleasure in certain cases entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves.'

'Justice is a kind of agreement not to harm or be harmed, made when men associate with each other at any time and in communities of any size. If somebody lays down a law and it does not prove to be of advantage in human relations, then such a law no longer has the true character of justice.'

'It is impossible to get rid of our anxieties about essentials if we do not understand the nature of the universe and are apprehensive about some of the theological accounts. Hence it is impossible to enjoy our pleasures unadulterated without science. There is no advantage in gaining security with regard to other people if phenomena occurring above and beneath the earth - in a word, everything in the infinite universe - are objects of anxiety.'

I could go on. Epicurus > Muhammad. In the first century BCE, an Epicurean called Lucretius wrote a poem attacking the polytheist religions of the Roman Empire and explaining natural phenomena using (now adorably outdated) scientific explanations. He sometimes sounds quite Dawkinsesque:

'Some people who know nothing of matter believe that nature without the guidance of the gods could not bring round the changing seasons in such perfect conformity to human needs, creating the crops and those other blessings that mortals are led to enjoy by the guide of life, pleasure. Obviously, in imagining that the gods established everything for the sake of men, they have stumbled in all respects far from the path of truth. Even if I knew nothing of atoms, I would venture to assert on the evidence of the celestial phenomena themselves, supported by many other arguments, that the universe was certainly not created for us by divine power; it is so full of imperfections.'