Superstition In All Ages (1732) | Page 4

are joined to such a
morose disposition, society necessarily becomes troubled. This is why
so many nations have often become the theaters of extravagances
caused by nonsensical visionists, who, publishing their shallow
speculations for the eternal truth, have kindled the enthusiasm of
princes and of people, and have prepared them for opinions which they
represented as essential to the glory of divinity and to the happiness of
empires. We have seen, a thousand times, in all parts of our globe,
infuriated fanatics slaughtering each other, lighting the funeral piles,
committing without scruple, as a matter of duty, the greatest crimes.
Why? To maintain or to propagate the impertinent conjectures of
enthusiasts, or to sanction the knaveries of impostors on account of a
being who exists only in their imagination, and who is known only by
the ravages, the disputes, and the follies which he has caused upon the
earth.
Originally, savage nations, ferocious, perpetually at war, adored, under
various names, some God conformed to their ideas; that is to say, cruel,
carnivorous, selfish, greedy of blood. We find in all the religions of the
earth a God of armies, a jealous God, an avenging God, an
exterminating God, a God who enjoys carnage and whose worshipers
make it a duty to serve him to his taste. Lambs, bulls, children, men,

heretics, infidels, kings, whole nations, are sacrificed to him. The
zealous servants of this barbarous God go so far as to believe that they
are obliged to offer themselves as a sacrifice to him. Everywhere we
see zealots who, after having sadly meditated upon their terrible God,
imagine that, in order to please him, they must do themselves all the
harm possible, and inflict upon themselves, in his honor, all imaginable
torments. In a word, everywhere the baneful ideas of Divinity, far from
consoling men for misfortunes incident to their existence, have filled
the heart with trouble, and given birth to follies destructive to them.
How could the human mind, filled with frightful phantoms and guided
by men interested in perpetuating its ignorance and its fear, make
progress? Man was compelled to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; he
was preserved only by invisible powers, upon whom his fate was
supposed to depend. Solely occupied with his alarms and his
unintelligible reveries, he was always at the mercy of his priests, who
reserved for themselves the right of thinking for him and of regulating
his conduct.
Thus man was, and always remained, a child without experience, a
slave without courage, a loggerhead who feared to reason, and who
could never escape from the labyrinth into which his ancestors had
misled him; he felt compelled to groan under the yoke of his Gods, of
whom he knew nothing except the fabulous accounts of their ministers.
These, after having fettered him by the ties of opinion, have remained
his masters or delivered him up defenseless to the absolute power of
tyrants, no less terrible than the Gods, of whom they were the
representatives upon the earth. Oppressed by the double yoke of
spiritual and temporal power, it was impossible for the people to
instruct themselves and to work for their own welfare. Thus, religion,
politics, and morals became sanctuaries, into which the profane were
not permitted to enter. Men had no other morality than that which their
legislators and their priests claimed as descended from unknown
empyrean regions. The human mind, perplexed by these theological
opinions, misunderstood itself, doubted its own powers, mistrusted
experience, feared truth, disdained its reason, and left it to blindly
follow authority. Man was a pure machine in the hands of his tyrants
and his priests, who alone had the right to regulate his movements.

Always treated as a slave, he had at all times and in all places the vices
and dispositions of a slave.
These are the true sources of the corruption of habits, to which religion
never opposes anything but ideal and ineffectual obstacles; ignorance
and servitude have a tendency to make men wicked and unhappy.
Science, reason, liberty, alone can reform them and render them more
happy; but everything conspires to blind them and to confirm them in
their blindness. The priests deceive them, tyrants corrupt them in order
to subjugate them more easily. Tyranny has been, and will always be,
the chief source of the depraved morals and habitual calamities of the
people. These, almost always fascinated by their religious notions or by
metaphysical fictions, instead of looking upon the natural and visible
causes of their miseries, attribute their vices to the imperfections of
their nature, and their misfortunes to the anger of their Gods; they offer
to Heaven vows, sacrifices, and presents, in order to put an end to their
misfortunes, which are really due only to the negligence, the ignorance,
and to the perversity