The esteem which so many people have for the spiritual substance,
appears to result from the impossibility they find in defining it in an
intelligible way. The contempt which our metaphysicians show for matter,
comes from the fact that "familiarity breeds contempt." When they tell
us that the soul is more excellent and noble than the body, they tell us
nothing, except that what they know nothing about must be more beautiful
than that of which they have some faint ideas.
CVII.--THE DOGMA OF ANOTHER LIFE IS USEFUL BUT FOR THOSE WHO PROFIT BY IT
AT THE EXPENSE OF THE CREDULOUS PUBLIC.
We are constantly told of the usefulness of the dogma of life hereafter.
It is pretended that even if it should be a fiction, it is advantageous,
because it imposes upon men and leads them to virtue. But is it true
that this dogma renders men wiser and more virtuous? The nations where
this fiction is established, are they remarkable for the morality of
their conduct? Is not the visible world always preferred to the
invisible world? If those who are charged to instruct and to govern men
had themselves enlightenment and virtue, they would govern them far
better by realities than by vain chimeras; but deceitful, ambitious, and
corrupt, the legislators found it everywhere easier to put the nations
to sleep by fables than to teach them truths; than to develop their
reason; than to excite them to virtue by sensible and real motives; than
to govern them in a reasonable way.
Theologians, no doubt, have had reasons for making the soul immaterial.
They needed souls and chimeras to populate the imaginary regions which
they have discovered in the other life. Material souls would have been
subjected, like all bodies, to dissolution. Moreover, if men believe
that everything is to perish with the body, the geographers of the other
world would evidently lose the chance of guiding their souls to this
unknown abode. They would draw no profits from the hopes with which they
feast them, and from the terrors with which they take care to overwhelm
them. If the future is of no real utility to the human race, it is at
least of the greatest advantage to those who take upon themselves the
responsibility of conducting mankind thither.
CVIII.--IT IS FALSE THAT THE DOGMA OF ANOTHER LIFE CAN BE CONSOLING; AND
IF IT WERE, IT WOULD BE NO PROOF THAT THIS ASSERTION IS TRUE.
But, it will be said, is not the dogma of the immortality of the soul
consoling for beings who often find themselves very unhappy here below?
If this should be an illusion, is it not a sweet and agreeable one? Is
it not a benefit for man to believe that he can live again and enjoy,
sometime, the happiness which is refused to him on earth? Thus, poor
mortals! you make your wishes the measure of the truth! Because you
desire to live forever, and to be happier, you conclude from thence that
you will live forever, and that you will be more fortunate in an unknown
world than in the known world, in which you so often suffer! Consent,
then, to leave without regret this world, which causes more trouble than
pleasure to the majority of you. Resign yourselves to the order of
destiny, which decrees that you, like all other beings, should not
endure forever. But what will become of me? you ask! What you were
several millions of years ago. You were then, I do not know what; resign
yourselves, then, to become again in an instant, I do not know what;
what you were then; return peaceably to the universal home from which
you came without your knowledge into your material form, and pass by
without murmuring, like all the beings which surround you!
We are repeatedly told that religious ideas offer infinite consolation
to the unfortunate; it is pretended that the idea of the immortality of
the soul and of a happier life has a tendency to lift up the heart of
man and to sustain him in the midst of the adversities with which he is
assailed in this life. Materialism, on the contrary, is, we are told, an
afflicting system, tending to degrade man, which ranks him among brutes;
which destroys his courage, whose only hope is complete annihilation,
tending to lead him to despair, and inducing him to commit suicide as
soon as he suffers in this world. The grand policy of theologians is to
blow hot and to blow cold, to afflict and to console, to frighten and to
reassure.
According to the fictions of theology, the regions of the other life are
happy and unhappy. Nothing more difficult than to render one worthy of
the abode of felicity; nothing easier than to obtain a place in the
abode of torments that Divinity prepares for the unfortunate victims of
His eternal fury. Those who find the idea of another life so flattering
and so sweet, have they then forgotten that this other life, according
to them, is to be accompanied by torments for the majority of mortals?
Is not the idea of total annihilation infinitely preferable to the idea
of an eternal existence accompanied with suffering and gnashing of
teeth? The fear of ceasing to exist, is it more afflicting than the
thought of having not always been? The fear of ceasing to be is but an
evil for the imagination, which alone brought forth the dogma of another
life.
You say, O Christian philosophers, that the idea of a happier life is
delightful; we agree; there is no one who would not desire a more
agreeable and a more durable existence than the one we enjoy here below.
But, if Paradise is tempting, you will admit, also, that hell is
frightful. It is very difficult to merit heaven, and very easy to gain
hell. Do you not say that one straight and narrow path leads to the
happy regions, and that a broad road leads to the regions of the
unhappy? Do you not constantly tell us that the number of the chosen
ones is very small, and that of the damned is very large? Do we not
need, in order to be saved, such grace as your God grants to but few?
Well! I tell you that these ideas are by no means consoling; I prefer to
be annihilated at once rather than to burn forever; I will tell you that
the fate of beasts appears to me more desirable than the fate of the
damned; I will tell you that the belief which delivers me from
overwhelming fears in this world, appears to me more desirable than the
uncertainty in which I am left through belief in a God who, master of
His favors, gives them but to His favorites, and who permits all the
others to render themselves worthy of eternal punishments. It can be but
blind enthusiasm or folly that can prefer a system which evidently
encourages improbable conjectures, accompanied by uncertainty and
desolating fear.
CIX.--ALL RELIGIOUS PRINCIPLES ARE IMAGINARY. INNATE SENSE IS BUT THE
EFFECT OF A ROOTED HABIT. GOD IS AN IDLE FANCY, AND THE QUALITIES WHICH
ARE LAVISHED UPON HIM DESTROY EACH OTHER.
All religious principles are a thing of imagination, in which experience
and reason have nothing to do. We find much difficulty in conquering
them, because imagination, when once occupied in creating chimeras which
astonish or excite it, is incapable of reasoning. He who combats
religion and its phantasies by the arms of reason, is like a man who
uses a sword to kill flies: as soon as the blow is struck, the flies and
the fancies return to the minds from which we thought to have banished
them.
As soon as we refuse the proofs which theology pretends to give of the
existence of a God, they oppose to the arguments which destroy them, an
innate conviction, a profound persuasion, an invincible inclination
inherent in every man, which brings to him, in spite of himself, the
idea of an Almighty being which he can not altogether expel from his
mind, and which he is compelled to recognize in spite of the strongest
reasons that we can give him. But if we wish to analyze this innate
conviction, upon which so much weight is placed, we will find that it is
but the effect of a rooted habit, which, making them close their eyes
against the most demonstrative proofs, leads the majority of men, and
often the most enlightened ones, back to the prejudices of childhood.
What can this innate sense or this ill-founded persuasion prove against
the evidence which shows us that what implies contradiction can not
exist?
We are told, very gravely, that it is not demonstrated that God does not
exist. However, nothing is better demonstrated, notwithstanding all that
men have told us so far, than that this God is an idle fancy, whose
existence is totally impossible, as nothing is more evident or more
clearly demonstrated than that a being can not combine qualities so
dissimilar, so contradictory, so irreconcilable as those which all the
religions of the earth ascribe to Divinity. The theologian's God, as
well as the God of the theist, is He not evidently a cause incompatible
with the effects attributed to Him? In whatever light we may look upon
it, we must either invent another God, or conclude that the one which,
for so many centuries, has been revealed to mortals, is at the same time
very good and very wicked, very powerful and very weak, immutable and
changeable, perfectly intelligent and perfectly destitute of reason, of
plan, and of means; the friend of order and permitting disorder; very
just and very unjust; very skillful and very awkward. Finally, are we
not obliged to admit that it is impossible to reconcile the discordant
attributes which are heaped upon a being of whom we can not say a single
word without falling into the most palpable contradictions? Let us
attempt to attribute but a single quality to Divinity, and what is said
of it will be contradicted immediately by the effects we assign to this
cause.
CX.--EVERY RELIGION IS BUT A SYSTEM IMAGINED FOR THE PURPOSE OF
RECONCILING CONTRADICTIONS BY THE AID OF MYSTERIES.
Theology could very properly be defined as the science of
contradictions. Every religion is but a system imagined for the purpose
of reconciling irreconcilable ideas. By the aid of habitude and terror,
we come to persist in the greatest absurdities, even when they are the
most clearly exposed. All religions are easy to combat, but very
difficult to eradicate. Reason can do nothing against habit, which
becomes, as is said, a second nature. There are many persons otherwise
sensible, who, even after having examined the ruinous foundations of
their belief, return to it in spite of the most striking arguments.
As soon as we complain of not understanding religion, finding in it at
every step absurdities which are repulsive, seeing in it but
impossibilities, we are told that we are not made to conceive the truths
of the religion which is proposed to us; that wandering reason is but an
unfaithful guide, only capable of conducting us to perdition; and what
is more, we are assured that what is folly in the eyes of man, is wisdom
in the eyes of God, to whom nothing is impossible. Finally, in order to
decide by a single word the most insurmountable difficulties which
theology presents to us on all sides, they simply cry out: "Mysteries!"
CXI.--ABSURDITY AND INUTILITY OF THE MYSTERIES FORGED IN THE SOLE
INTEREST OF THE PRIESTS.
What is a mystery? If I examine the thing closely, I discover very soon
that a mystery is nothing but a contradiction, a palpable absurdity, a
notorious impossibility, on which theologians wish to compel men to
humbly close the eyes; in a word, a mystery is whatever our spiritual
guides can not explain to us.
It is advantageous for the ministers of religion that the people should
not comprehend what they are taught. It is impossible for us to examine
what we do not comprehend. Every time that we can not see clearly, we
are obliged to be guided. If religion was comprehensible, priests would
not have so many charges here below.
No religion is without mysteries; mystery is its essence; a religion
destitute of mysteries would be a contradiction of terms. The God which
serves as a foundation to natural religion, to theism or to deism, is
Himself the greatest mystery to a mind wishing to dwell upon Him.