Did not a famous theologian recognize the absurdity of admitting the
existence of a God and arresting His course? "To us," he said, "who
believe through faith in a true God, an individual substance, there
ought to be no trouble in believing everything else. This first mystery,
which is no small matter of itself, once admitted, our reason can not
suffer violence in admitting all the rest. As for myself, it is no more
trouble to accept a million of things that I do not understand, than to
believe the first one."
Is there anything more contradictory, more impossible, or more
mysterious, than the creation of matter by an immaterial Being, who
Himself immutable, causes the continual changes that we see in the
world? Is there anything more incompatible with all the ideas of common
sense than to believe that a good, wise, equitable, and powerful Being
presides over nature and directs Himself the movements of a world which
is filled with follies, miseries, crimes, and disorders, which He could
have foreseen, and by a single word could have prevented or made to
disappear? Finally, as soon as we admit a Being so contradictory as the
theological God, what right have we to refuse to accept the most
improbable fables, the most astonishing miracles, the most profound
mysteries?
CXVIII.--THE DEIST'S GOD IS NO LESS CONTRADICTORY, NO LESS FANCIFUL, THAN
THE THEOLOGIAN'S GOD.
The theist exclaims, "Be careful not to worship the ferocious and
strange God of theology; mine is much wiser and better; He is the Father
of men; He is the mildest of Sovereigns; it is He who fills the universe
with His benefactions!" But I will tell him, do you not see that
everything in this world contradicts the good qualities which you
attribute to your God? In the numerous family of this mild Father I see
but unfortunate ones. Under the empire of this just Sovereign I see
crime victorious and virtue in distress. Among these benefactions, which
you boast of, and which your enthusiasm alone sees, I see a multitude of
evils of all kinds, upon which you obstinately close your eyes.
Compelled to acknowledge that your good God, in contradiction with
Himself, distributes with the same hand good and evil, you will find
yourself obliged, in order to justify Him, to send me, as the priests
would, to the other life. Invent, then, another God than the one of
theology, because your God is as contradictory as its God is. A good God
who does evil or who permits it to be done, a God full of equity and in
an empire where innocence is so often oppressed; a perfect God who
produces but imperfect and wretched works; such a God and His conduct,
are they not as great mysteries as that of the incarnation? You blush,
you say, for your fellow beings who are persuaded that the God of the
universe could change Himself into a man and die upon a cross in a
corner of Asia. You consider the ineffable mystery of the Trinity very
absurd Nothing appears more ridiculous to you than a God who changes
Himself into bread and who is eaten every day in a thousand different
places.
Well! are all these mysteries any more shocking to reason than a God who
punishes and rewards men's actions? Man, according to your views, is he
free or not? In either case your God, if He has the shadow of justice,
can neither punish him nor reward him. If man is free, it is God who
made him free to act or not to act; it is God, then, who is the
primitive cause of all his actions; in punishing man for his faults, He
would punish him for having done that which He gave him the liberty to
do. If man is not free to act otherwise than he does, would not God be
the most unjust of beings to punish him for the faults which he could
not help committing? Many persons are struck with the detail of
absurdities with which all religions of the world are filled; but they
have not the courage to seek for the source whence these absurdities
necessarily sprung. They do not see that a God full of contradictions,
of oddities, of incompatible qualities, either inflaming or nursing the
imagination of men, could create but a long line of idle fancies.
CXIX.--WE DO NOT PROVE AT ALL THE EXISTENCE OF A GOD BY SAYING THAT IN
ALL AGES EVERY NATION HAS ACKNOWLEDGED SOME KIND OF DIVINITY.
They believe, to silence those who deny the existence of a God, by
telling them that all men, in all ages and in all centuries, have
believed in some kind of a God; that there is no people on the earth who
have not believed in an invisible and powerful being, whom they made the
object of their worship and of their veneration; finally, that there is
no nation, no matter how benighted we may suppose it to be, that is not
persuaded of the existence of some intelligence superior to human
nature. But can the belief of all men change an error into truth? A
celebrated philosopher has said with all reason: "Neither general
tradition nor the unanimous consent of all men could place any
injunction upon truth." [Bayle.] Another wise man said before him, that
"an army of philosophers would not be sufficient to change the nature of
error and to make it truth." [Averroës]
There was a time when all men believed that the sun revolved around the
earth, while the latter remained motionless in the center of the whole
system of the universe; it is scarcely more than two hundred years since
this error was refuted. There was a time when nobody would believe in
the existence of antipodes, and when they persecuted those who had the
courage to sustain it; to-day no learned man dares to doubt it. All
nations of the world, except some men less credulous than others, still
believe in sorcerers, ghosts, apparitions, spirits; no sensible man
imagines himself obliged to adopt these follies; but the most sensible
people feel obliged to believe in a universal Spirit!
CXX.--ALL THE GODS ARE OF A BARBAROUS ORIGIN; ALL RELIGIONS ARE ANTIQUE
MONUMENTS OF IGNORANCE, SUPERSTITION, AND FEROCITY; AND MODERN RELIGIONS
ARE BUT ANCIENT FOLLIES REVIVED.
All the Gods worshiped by men have a barbarous origin; they were visibly
imagined by stupid nations, or were presented by ambitious and cunning
legislators to simple and benighted people, who had neither the capacity
nor the courage to examine properly the object which, by means of
terrors, they were made to worship. In examining closely the God which
we see adored still in our days by the most civilized nations, we are
compelled to acknowledge that He has evidently barbarous features. To be
barbarous is to recognize no right but force; it is being cruel to
excess; it is but following one's own caprice; it is a lack of
foresight, of prudence, and reason. Nations, who believe yourselves
civilized! do you not perceive this frightful character of the God to
whom you offer your incense? The pictures which are drawn of Divinity,
are they not visibly borrowed from the implacable, jealous, vindictive,
blood-thirsty, capricious, inconsiderate humor of man, who has not yet
cultivated his reason? Oh, men! you worship but a great savage, whom you
consider as a model to follow, as an amiable master, as a perfect
sovereign.
The religious opinions of men in every country are antique and durable
monuments of ignorance credulity, of the terrors and the ferocity of
their ancestors. Every barbarian is a child thirsting for the wonderful,
which he imbibes with pleasure, and who never reasons upon that which he
finds proper to excite his imagination; his ignorance of the ways of
nature makes him attribute to spirits, to enchantments, to magic, all
that appears to him extraordinary; in his eyes his priests are
sorcerers, in whom he supposes an Almighty power; before whom his
confused reason humiliates itself, whose oracles are for him infallible
decrees, to contradict which would be dangerous. In matters of religion
the majority of men have remained in their primitive barbarity. Modern
religions are but follies of old times rejuvenated or presented in some
new form. If the ancient barbarians have worshiped mountains, rivers,
serpents, trees, fetishes of every kind; if the wise Egyptians worshiped
crocodiles, rats, onions, do we not see nations who believe themselves
wiser than they, worship with reverence a bread, into which they imagine
that the enchantments of their priests cause the Divinity to descend? Is
not the God-bread the fetish of many Christian nations, as little
rational in this point as that of the most barbarous nations?