Famed atheist Richard Dawkins sat down with Playboy Magazine to discuss “the simple beauty of evolution, the improbability of God and why the pope should be arrested,” among other subjects. As usual, Dawkins took a provocative approach in the interview — one that people of faith will surely find offensive. These contentious anti-religious views appear in the September issue of Playboy.

“The evidence he existed is surprisingly shaky,” he told Playboy. “The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It’s almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren’t that interested in whether Jesus was real.”

Dawkins called the idea that “Jesus died for our sins” “barking mad.” At the center of his angst over the salvation story is the notion that God found the need to torture himself to the point of death. He called the entire story “a truly disgusting idea.”