Shane

“For, if He doesn’t exist, man is master of the world, of all creation. Splendid! Only how is he going to be virtuous without God? That’s the question! I keep coming back to it. Who is he going to love then—man, I mean? To whom is he going to offer his gratitude, to whom is he going to sing his hymn of praise? Rakitin is ridiculous. Rakitin says you don’t need God to love mankind. Only a snotty pipsqueak could assert such a thing, it’s beyond me how he can say that. It’s all right for Rakitin. “You”, he said to me today, “should be fighting for the extension of man’s civic rights, or at least for the price of meat not to go up; that’s the simplest and most direct way of manifesting your love for mankind, rather than by philosophizing.” I came straight back at him: “Without God,” I said, “you’d be the first to raise the price of meat if the opportunity presented itself and there was a rouble or two to be made.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Karamazov Brothers