Let us proceed to the pretended visions and Divine Revelations, upon
which our Christ-worshipers establish the truth and the certainty of
their religion.
In order to give a just idea of it, I believe it is best to say in
general, that they are such, that if any one should dare now to boast of
similar ones, or wish to make them valued, he would certainly be
regarded as a fool or a fanatic.
Here is what the pretended Visions and Divine Revelations are:
God, as these pretended Holy Books claim, having appeared for the first
time to Abraham, said to him: "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy
kindred and from thy father's house, into a land that I will show thee."
Abraham, having gone there, God, says the Bible, appeared the second
time to him, and said, "Unto thy seed will I give this land," and there
builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him. After the
death of Isaac, his son, Jacob going one day to Mesopotamia to look for
a wife that would suit him, having walked all the day, and being tired
from the long distance, desired to rest toward evening; lying upon the
ground, with his head resting upon a few stones, he fell asleep, and
during his sleep he saw a ladder set upon the earth, and the top of it
reached to Heaven; and beheld the angels of God ascending and descending
on it. And behold, the Lord stood above it, and said: "I am the Lord,
God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac; the land whereon thou
liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed. And thy seed shall be as
the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to
the east, and to the north and to the south and in thee and in thy seed
shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. And behold, I am with
thee and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring
thee again into this land: for I will not leave thee until I have done
that which I have spoken to thee of." And Jacob awaked out of his sleep,
and he said: "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not." And
he was afraid, and said: "How dreadful is this place! this is none other
than the house of God, and this is the gate of Heaven." And Jacob rose
up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his
pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil on the top of it, and
made at the same time a vow to God, that if he should return safe and
sound, he would give Him a tithe of all he might possess.
Here is yet another vision. Watching the flocks of his father-in-law,
Laban, who had promised him that all the speckled lambs produced by his
sheep should be his recompense, he dreamed one night that he saw all the
males leap upon the females, and all the lambs they brought forth were
speckled. In this beautiful dream, God appeared to him, and said: "Lift
up now thine eyes and see that the rams which leap upon the cattle are
ring-streaked, speckled, and grizzled; for I have seen all that Laban
does unto thee. Now arise, get thee out from this land, and return unto
the land of thy kindred." As he was returning with his whole family, and
with all he obtained from his father-in-law, he had, says the Bible, a
wrestle with an unknown man during the whole night, until the breaking
of the day, and as this man had not been able to subdue him, He asked
him who he was. Jacob told Him his name; and He said: "Thy name shall be
called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with
God and with men, and hast prevailed."
This is a specimen of the first of these pretended Visions and Divine
Revelations. We can judge of the others by these. Now, what appearance
of Divinity is there in dreams so gross and illusions so vain? As if
some foreigners, Germans, for instance, should come into our France,
and, after seeing all the beautiful provinces of our kingdom, should
claim that God had appeared to them in their country, that He had told
them to go into France, and that He would give to them and to their
posterity all the beautiful lands, domains, and provinces of this
kingdom which extend from the rivers Rhine and Rhone, even to the sea;
that He would make an everlasting alliance with them, that He would
multiply their race, that He would make their posterity as numerous as
the stars of Heaven and as the sands of the sea, etc., who would not
laugh at such folly, and consider these strangers as insane fools!
Now there is no reason to think otherwise of all that has been said by
these pretended Holy Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in regard to
the Divine Revelations which they claim to have had. As to the
institution of bloody sacrifices, the Holy Scriptures attribute it to
God. As it would be too wearisome to go into the disgusting details of
this kind of sacrifices, I refer the reader to Exodus. [See chapters
xxv., xxvii., xxyiii., and xxix.]
Were not men insane and blind to believe they were honoring God by
tearing into pieces, butchering, and burning His own creatures, under
the pretext of offering them as sacrifices to Him? And even now, how is
it that our Christ-worshipers are so extravagant as to expect to please
God the Father, by offering up to Him the sacrifice of His Divine Son,
in remembrance of His being shamefully nailed to a cross upon which He
died? Certainly this can spring only from an obstinate blindness of
mind.
In regard to the detail of the sacrifices of animals, it consists but in
colored clothing, blood, plucks, livers, birds' crops, kidneys, claws,
skins, in the dung, smoke, cakes, certain measures of oil and wine, the
whole being offered and infected by dirty ceremonies as filthy and
contemptible as the most extravagant performances of magic. What is most
horrible of all this is, that the law of this detestable Jewish people
commanded that even men should be offered up as sacrifices. The
barbarians, whoever they were, who introduced this horrible law,
commanded to put to death any man who had been consecrated to the God of
the Jews, whom they called Adonai: and it is according to this execrable
precept that Jephthah sacrificed his daughter, and that Saul wanted to
sacrifice his son.
But here is yet another proof of the falsity of these revelations of
which we have spoken. It is the lack of the fulfillment of the great and
magnificent promises by which they were accompanied, for it is evident
that these promises never have been fulfilled.
The proof of this consists in three principal points:
Firstly. Their posterity was to be more numerous than all the other
nations of the world.
Secondly. The people who should spring from their race were to be the
happiest, the holiest, and the most victorious of all the people of the
earth.
Thirdly. His covenant was to be everlasting, and they should possess
forever the country He should give them. Now it is plain that these
promises-never were fulfilled.
Firstly. It is certain that the Jewish people, or the people of
Israel--which is the only one that can be regarded as having descended
from the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the only ones to whom
these promises should have been fulfilled--have never been so numerous
that it could be compared with the other nations of the earth, much less
with the sands of the sea, etc., for we see that in the very time when
it was the most numerous and the most flourishing, it never occupied
more than the little sterile provinces of Palestine and its environs,
which are almost nothing in comparison with the vast extent of a
multitude of flourishing kingdoms which are on all sides of the earth.
Secondly. They have never been fulfilled concerning the great blessings
with which they were to be favored; for, although they won a few small
victories over some poor nations whom they plundered, this did not
prevent them from being conquered and reduced to servitude; their
kingdom destroyed as well as their nation, by the Roman army; and even
now the remainder of this unfortunate nation is looked upon as the
vilest and most contemptible of all the earth, having no country, no
dominion, no superiority.
Finally, these promises have not been fulfilled in respect to this
everlasting covenant, which God ought to have fulfilled to them; because
we do not see now, and we have never seen, any evidence of this
covenant; and, on the contrary, they have been for many centuries
excluded from the possession of the small country they pretended God had
promised that they should enjoy forever. Thus, since these pretended
promises were never fulfilled, it is certain evidence of their falsity;
which proves, plainly, that these pretended Holy Books which contain
them were not of Divine inspiration. Therefore it is useless for our
Christ-worshipers to pretend to make use of them as infallible testimony
to prove the truth of their religion.