PANTHER -> Site news -> Translations from Voltaire (mine): Freedom of thought
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 17 December 2011, 11:55 PM
  Messssieurs, vous n'aimez point mes traductions? C'est impossible, ça. And, as I have pointed out previously I am not Constance Bonacieux, though certainly I can make a guess at Milady de Winter. 'The Government has been convinced that common sense would make the State go up in flames and the country become the most miserable on earth.' Quite so, yes. FREEDOM OF THOUGHT Around 1707, at the time when the English won the Battle of Saragossa, were protectors of Portugal and briefly gave a king to Spain, Lord Boldmind, a general who had been wounded, took the waters at Barege. There he met Count Medroso who’d fallen off his horse a league and a half from the battle-field. He was an intimate of the Inquisition. Lord Boldmind was intimate only in conversation. One day, after drinking, they had the following exchange:
BOLDMIND: So you’re a sergeant with the Domincans. That’s a rotten job. MEDROSO: True, but I’d rather be their servant than their victim and I chose the misfortune of burning my neighbour to that of being cooked myself. BOLDMIND: What a dreadful choice! You’d be a hundred times better off under the dominion of the Moors, who’d leave you free to wallow in your superstitions and who, conquerors though they are, do not have the presumption to chain up minds.
MEDROSO: What do you expect? We’re not allowed to write, to speak, or even to think. If we speak, they find it easy to twist our words and our writings even more so. Finally, since no-one can burn us for our private thoughts, we are threatened with burning for eternity at the command of God himself if we don’t think like the Dominicans. The Government has been convinced that common sense would make the State go up in flames and the country become the most miserable on earth. BOLDMIND: Do you think that we English are so wretched, we who cover the seas with our ships and who have won battles for you the length of Europe? Does it seem to you that the Dutch, who taken over practically all your possessions in the Indies, and who today count among your protectors, are cursed by God because they have given complete freedom to the press, and trade in ideas? Was the Roman Empire less powerful because Cicero wrote in freedom? MEDROSO: Who’s he? I have never heard the holy Hermandad pronounce that name. BOLDMIND: He was a product of the University of Rome who wrote what he thought, like Julius Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Titus Lucretius Carus, Plinius, Seneca and other scholars. MEDROSO: Never heard of these guys. [Translator’s note. Sorry…] I have been told that the Catholic religion is finished if people start to think. BOLDMND: You don’t have to believe it You’re sure that your religion is divine and that the gates of hell cannot prevail against it. If that is the case, nothing will be able to destroy it. MEDROSO:. No, but it can be reduced to a trifle and it’s because of thinking that Sweden, Denmark, the whole of your island, half of Germany groan under the terrible misery of no longer being subjects of the pope. People even say that if men continue to along their false paths they will soon come to simple worship of God and virtue. If the gates of hell prevail thus far, what would become of the Holy Office? BOLDMIND: If the first Christians hadn’t had freedom of thought, is it not the case that there wouldn’t be any Christianity? MEDROSO: What do you mean? I don’t understand. BOLDMIND: I can believe it. I mean that if Tiberius and the first emperors had had Dominicans to keep the first Christians from pen and ink, if freedom of thought hadn’t been established in the Rman Empire , it would have been impossible for the Christians to establish their religion. If, therefore, Christianity only came about because of freedom of thought, isn’t it a contradiction and a wrong that today it wants to extinguish this liberty to which alone it owes its existence? If someone offers you a business proposition, don’t you consider it for a long time before deciding? What greater preoccupations can we have in the world than our happiness or our eternal suffering? There are a hundred religions in the world and they all damn you for your beliefs, which they call absurd and blaphemous. Examine your beliefs, therefore. MEDROSO: How can I? I‘m not a Dominican. BOLDMIND: You‘re a man. That‘s enough. MEDROSO: Oh dear You‘re more of a man than I am. BOLDMIND: All you have to do is learn to think. You were born with a mind. You‘re like a bird caged by the Inquisition; the Holy Office has clipped your wings. They can regrow! Someone who knows no geometry can learn it. It is shameful to put your soul in the hands of those to whom you would not entrust your money. Dare to think for yourself. MEDROSO: They tell us that if everyone thought for himself there would be Babel. BOLDMIND: It’s quite the opposite. When you’re in the theatre, everyone freely gives his view of the play and no-one’s upset. But if some arrogant defender of a bad playwright tries to force people of discrimination to find good what they think is bad, then the whistles and the fruit-throwing start, as happened once in London. Big Brother (Translator’s note: literally tyrants of the mind) has caused half the misery in the world. We have only been happy in England since everyone has been able to freely exercise the right to speak his mind. MEDROSO: We’re also quite contented in Lisbon where no-one can speak his. BOLDMIND: You are content but you are not happy. Yours is the calm of the galley-slave rowing silently away in sync. MEDROSO: You think my soul is in the galleys? BOLDMIND: Yes, and I want to liberate you! MEDROSO: Suppose I like it in the galleys. BOLDMIND: Then you deserve to be there. (Dictionnaire philosophique)
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PANTHER -> Site news -> Translations from Voltaire (mine): Transubstantiation
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 17 December 2011, 11:54 PM
  Protestants, especially thinking Protestants, regard transubstantiation as the last word in the impertinence of the monks and the stupidity of the laity. They are unrestrained about this belief, which they call monstrous. They don't even think there can be a single man of intelligence who having thought about it can possibly take it seriously. It is, they say, so absurd, so contrary to all the laws of physics, so self-contradictory, that God himself could not have done it, because it is basically to annul God to suppose that he is contradictory. Not only a god in a loaf, but a god instead of a loaf, a hundred thousand crumbs becoming instantly as many gods, this huge throng of gods being only one god, purity without anything pure, form without anything formed. Wine changed into blood and still tasting of wine, flesh and muscle which taste of bread. All this inspires such horror and contempt in the enemies of the apostolic Roman church that an excess of horror and contempt sometimes becomes rage. Their horror increases when you tell them that you can see daily in Catholic countries priests and monks who fresh from a bed of incest without having washed their hands soiled with impurities make these hundreds of gods, eat and drink their god, shit and piss their god. But when they consider that this superstition a hundred times more absurd and blasphemous than any of those of the Egyptians is worth to an Italian priest 15 to 20 million in revenue and the domination of a country a hundred miles wide and long, they all want to take arms and kick out this priest who has taken over the Palace of the Caesars. I don't know if I'll go on the trip because I'm a peaceful sort, but when they're settled in Rome I'll certainly pay them a visit.
"By M. Guillaume, Protestant Minister"
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PANTHER -> Site news -> Translations from Voltaire (mine): Concerning the Church of England
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 17 December 2011, 11:53 PM
  You'd really like me to tidy these up and publish them, wouldn't you. Yes, I knew it! The year is 1726...A lettre de cachet has landed Voltaire back in the Bastille. He'd already spent eleven months there back in 1717 as a mere stripling of 23, ironically for something he hadn't done. This time he's done something. The Chevalier de Rohan is upset. It is reasonable to suppose Voltaire thought Paris offered better accommodation. After a few days he is released on the proviso he removes himself from Paris. He went to London and stayed here. As a result of his stay he wrote the Lettres philosophiques, a series of essays on England and the English. Watch that pen dipped in acid. LETTER FIVE: CONCERNING THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND England is multi-denominational. ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions.’ An Englishman, as a free man, goes to heaven by the path he chooses. However, although everyone may serve God in his own way, the real religion of the country, the one from which money is made, is the Episcopalian Church, known as the Anglican Church or simply the Church. In England and Ireland no-one can be employed without being one of the Anglican faithful. This compelling proof of Anglican teaching has converted so many Non-Conformists that today barely a twentieth of the nation lies outside the bosom of the Established Church. The Anglican priesthood has retained many Catholic rites and especially that of receiving the tithe with meticulous care. They too want to be the masters. What parish priest doesn’t yearn to be Pope! Moreover, they stir the faithful up against the Non-Conformists. Such zeal was quite marked under the Tory government of the final years of Anne’s reign but it went no further than occasionally breaking chapel windows. Sectarian hysteria ended in England with the Civil War and under Anne was no more than the dulled rumblings of a sea still restless after the storm. When the Whigs and Tories tore the country apart, as had the Guelfs and Ghibelins in Italy, naturally religion entered the fray. The Tories took the side of the bishops. The Whigs claimed to want the abolition of the episcopacy but when they got into power they limited themselves to reining the bishops in. When Harley and Bolingbroke raised their glasses to the Tories, the Anglican Church regarded them as defenders of its sacred privileges. The convocation of the lower clergy, a sort of House of Commons composed of priests, still had some influence and had at least freedom of assembly, the freedom to dispute and the freedom to burn blasphemous books, in other words works opposing it. Today’s Whig government doesn’t allow this assembly and the priests are reduced to remaining in the obscurity of their parishes performing the sad task of praying for a government whose downfall would not perturb them. As for the bishops, 26 in all, they retain seats in the House of Lords despite the Whigs, since the custom, the abuse, of regarding them as peers continues. There is a clause in the oath they give to the State which greatly taxes their Christian humility. They swear to be part of the Church of England as established by law. Since there is scarcely a bishop, a dean, an archbishop who doesn’t think himself divinely appointed, it mortifies them terribly to be obliged to affirm they owe their positions wholly to a wretched law devised by a profane laity. A learned monk, Father Courayer, has written a book to demonstrate the validity of Anglican ordination. This book is banned in France. Do you think that pleases the Anglican ministry? Not a bit of it. The wretched Whigs don't care whether the episcopal succession has been ruptured and whether Bishop Parker was consecrated in a public-house (as was wanted) or in a church. They even prefer that the bishops owe their authority to Parliament rather than to the Gospels. Lord B said that the concept of divine right serves only to make dictators in surplices but that law makes citizens. The Anglican clergy are more disciplined than the French. They all come from Oxford or Cambridge, far from the corruption of the capital, and it is only late in life that they are called to high office, at the age when the only passion men have left is greed. Preferment is the reward for long service in the Church as it is in the Army. There are here no young bishops or colonels fresh from school. Also, the priests are for the most part married. The gaucheness of manner of the Universities, the few dealings they have with women, mean that a bishop is usually forced to make do with his own wife. Custom permits the clergy to go to public houses, but if they get drunk it’s quietly and without causing a scandal. That indefinable entity known as an abbé, neither a priest nor a layman, is not a creature known in England. The clergy are nearly all very highbrow. When you tell them that in France dissolute young men raised to the prelacy by the shenanigans of women make love in public, entertain themselves by composing love-songs, dine every day on long and tasty meals and then go to ask the blessing of the Holy Spirit and brazenly identify themselves as the successors of the apostles, they thank God that they are Protestant. But as Rabelais said these are foul heretics who will perish in the eternal flames and I should not dream of dabbling in their affairs. 




​PANTHER -> Site news -> Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason 1794
by Ysabel Howard - Saturday, 17 December 2011, 11:52 PM
  Thomas Paine (1794) The Age of Reason Source: From Constitution Society, where the full text is available.
HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden.
TO MY FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA:
I PUT the following work under your protection. It contains my opinions upon Religion. You will do me the justice to remember, that I have always strenuously supported the Right of every Man to his own opinion, however different that opinion might be to mine. He who denies to another this right, makes a slave of himself to his present opinion, because he precludes himself the right of changing it.
The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is Reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall. Your affectionate friend and fellow-citizen,
THOMAS PAINE Luxembourg, 8th Pluviose,
Second Year of the French Republic, one and indivisible.
January 27, O. S. 1794.
PART FIRST IT has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow-citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it, could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work. The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity, and of the theology that is true. As several of my colleagues and others of my fellow-citizens of France have given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself. I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe in many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this? Soon after I had published the pamphlet Common Sense, in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more. Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet, as if the way to God was not open to every man alike. Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. The Jews say, that their word of God was given by God to Moses, face to face; the Christians say, that their word of God came by divine inspiration: and the Turks say, that their word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from Heaven. Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all. As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man. No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication – after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him. When Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the commandments from the hands of God, they were not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so. The commandments carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention.* [* It is, however, necessary to except the declaration which says that God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children; it is contrary to every principle of moral justice.] When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it. When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this – for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so – it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence. It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the son of God. He was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing, at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds: the story, therefore, had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story. It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian church sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand: the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud. Nothing that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practised was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers, many years before; by the Quakers since; and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or any thing else; not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his own writing. The history of him is altogether the work of other people; and as to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was the necessary counterpart to the story of his birth. His historians having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground. The wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told exceeds every thing that went before it. The first part, that of the miraculous conception, was not a thing that admitted of publicity; and therefore the tellers of this part of the story had this advantage, that though they might not be credited, they could not be detected. They could not be expected to prove it, because it was not one of those things that admitted of proof, and it was impossible that the person of whom it was told could prove it himself. But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon-day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the resurrection, and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and manual demonstration himself. So neither will I, and the reason is equally as good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas. It is in vain to attempt to palliate or disguise this matter. The story, so far as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition stamped upon the face of it. Who were the authors of it is as impossible for us now to know, as it is for us to be assured that the books in which the account is related were written by the persons whose names they bear; the best surviving evidence we now have respecting that affair is the Jews. They are regularly descended from the people who lived in the times this resurrection and ascension is said to have happened, and they say, it is not true. It has long appeared to me a strange inconsistency to cite the Jews as a proof of the truth of the story. It is just the same as if a man were to say, I will prove the truth of what I have told you by producing the people who say it is false. That such a person as Jesus Christ existed, and that he was crucified, which was the mode of execution at that day, are historical relations strictly within the limits of probability. He preached most excellent morality and the equality of man; but he preached also against the corruptions and avarice of the Jewish priests, and this brought upon him the hatred and vengeance of the whole order of priesthood. The accusation which those priests brought against him was that of sedition and conspiracy against the Roman government, to which the Jews were then subject and tributary; and it is not improbable that the Roman government might have some secret apprehensions of the effects of his doctrine, as well as the Jewish priests; neither is it improbable that Jesus Christ had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage of the Romans. Between the two, however, this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life. It is upon this plain narrative of facts, together with another case I am going to mention, that the Christian Mythologists, calling themselves the Christian Church, have erected their fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients. The ancient Mythologists tell us that the race of Giants made war against Jupiter, and that one of them threw a hundred rocks against him at one throw; that Jupiter defeated him with thunder, and confined him afterward under Mount Etna, and that every time the Giant turns himself Mount Etna belches fire. It is here easy to see that the circumstance of the mountain, that of its being a volcano, suggested the idea of the fable; and that the fable is made to fit and wind itself up with that circumstance. The Christian Mythologists tell us that their Satan made war against the Almighty, who defeated him, and confined him afterward, not under a mountain, but in a pit. It is here easy to see that the first fable suggested the idea of the second; for the fable of Jupiter and the Giants was told many hundred years before that of Satan. Thus far the ancient and the Christian Mythologists differ very little from each other. But the latter have contrived to carry the matter much farther. They have contrived to connect the fabulous part of the story of Jesus Christ with the fable originating from Mount Etna; and in order to make all the parts of the story tie together, they have taken to their aid the traditions of the Jews; for the Christian mythology is made up partly from the ancient mythology and partly from the Jewish traditions. The Christian Mythologists, after having confined Satan in a pit, were obliged to let him out again to bring on the sequel of the fable. He is then introduced into the Garden of Eden, in the shape of a snake or a serpent, and in that shape he enters into familiar conversation with Eve, who is no way surprised to hear a snake talk; and the issue of this tete-a-tete is that he persuades her to eat an apple, and the eating of that apple damns all mankind. After giving Satan this triumph over the whole creation, one would have supposed that the Church Mythologists would have been kind enough to send him back again to the pit; or, if they had not done this, that they would have put a mountain upon him (for they say that their faith can remove a mountain), or have put him under a mountain, as the former mythologists had done, to prevent his getting again among the women and doing more mischief. But instead of this they leave him at large, without even obliging him to give his parole – the secret of which is, that they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet into the bargain. After this, who can doubt the bountifulness of the Christian Mythology? Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in Heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded – put Satan into the pit – let him out again – giving him a triumph over the whole creation – damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, these Christian Mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and Man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple. Putting aside everything that might excite laughter by its absurdity, or detestation by its profaneness, and confining ourselves merely to an examination of the parts, it is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty, more inconsistent with his wisdom, more contradictory to his power, than this story is. In order to make for it a foundation to rise upon, the inventors were under the necessity of giving to the being whom they call Satan, a power equally as great, if not greater than they attribute to the Almighty. They have not only given him the power of liberating himself from the pit, after what they call his fall, but they have made that power increase afterward to infinity. Before this fall they represent him only as an angel of limited existence, as they represent the rest. After his fall, he becomes, by their account, omnipresent. He exists everywhere, and at the same time. He occupies the whole immensity of space. Not content with this deification of Satan, they represent him as defeating, by stratagem, in the shape of an animal of the creation, all the power and wisdom of the Almighty. They represent him as having compelled the Almighty to the direct necessity either of surrendering the whole of the creation to the government and sovereignty of this Satan, or of capitulating for its redemption by coming down upon earth, and exhibiting himself upon a cross in the shape of a man. Had the inventors of this story told it the contrary way, that is, had they represented the Almighty as compelling Satan to exhibit himself on a cross, in the shape of a snake, as a punishment for his new transgression, the story would have been less absurd – less contradictory. But instead of this, they make the transgressor triumph, and the Almighty fall. That many good men have believed this strange fable, and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime), is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have believed anything else in the same manner. There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story. The more unnatural anything is, the more it is capable of becoming the object of dismal admiration. But if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to receive us the instant we are born – a world furnished to our hands, that cost us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun, that pour down the rain, and fill the earth with abundance? Whether we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to us? Can our gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but a sacrifice of the Creator? I know that this bold investigation will alarm many, but it would be paying too great a compliment to their credulity to forbear it on their account; the times and the subject demand it to be done. The suspicion that the theory of what is called the Christian Church is fabulous is becoming very extensive in all countries; and it will be a consolation to men staggering under that suspicion, and doubting what to believe and what to disbelieve, to see the object freely investigated. I therefore pass on to an examination of the books called the Old and New Testament. These books, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation (which, by the by, is a book of riddles that requires a revelation to explain it), are, we are told, the word of God. It is, therefore, proper for us to know who told us so, that we may know what credit to give to the report. The answer to this question is, that nobody can tell, except that we tell one another so. The case, however, historically appears to be as follows: When the Church Mythologists established their system, they collected all the writings they could find, and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and New Testament are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them, or whether they added, altered, abridged, or dressed them up. Be this as it may, they decided by vote which of the books Gut of the collection they had made should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not. They rejected several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as the books called the Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority of votes, were voted to be the word of God. Had they voted otherwise, all the people, since calling themselves Christians, had believed otherwise – for the belief of the one comes from the vote of the other. Who the people were that did all this, we know nothing of; they called themselves by the general name of the Church, and this is all we know of the matter. As we have no other external evidence or authority for believing these books to be the word of God than what I have mentioned, which is no evidence or authority at all, I come, in the next place, to examine the internal evidence contained in the books themselves. In the former part of this Essay, I have spoken of revelation; I now proceed further with that subject, for the purpose of applying it to the books in question. Revelation is a communication of something which the person to whom that thing is revealed did not know before. For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it, nor to enable me to tell it, or to write it. Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth, of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and anecdotal parts of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God. When Samson ran off with the gate-posts of Gaza, if he ever did so (and whether he did or not is nothing to us), or when he visited his Delilah, or caught his foxes, or did any thing else, what has revelation to do with these things? If they were facts, he could tell them himself, or his secretary, if he kept one, could write them, if they were worth either telling or writing; and if they were fictions, revelation could not make them true; and whether true or not, we are neither the better nor the wiser for knowing them. When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and governs the incomprehensible WHOLE, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the word of God. As to the account of the Creation, with which the Book of Genesis opens, it has all the appearance of being a tradition which the Israelites had among them before they came into Egypt; and after their departure from that country they put it at the head of their history, without telling (as it is most probable) that they did not know how they came by it. The manner in which the account opens shows it to be traditionary. It begins abruptly; it is nobody that speaks; it is nobody that hears; it is addressed to nobody; it has neither first, second, nor third person; it has every criterion of being a tradition; it has no voucher. Moses does not take it upon himself by introducing it with the formality that he uses on other occasions, such as that of saying, “The Lord spake unto Moses, saying.” Why it has been called the Mosaic account of the Creation, I am at a loss to conceive. Moses, I believe, was too good a judge of such subjects to put his name to that account. He had been educated among The Egyptians, who were a people as well skilled in science, and particularly in astronomy, as any people of their day; and the silence and caution that Moses observes in not authenticating the account, is a good negative evidence that he neither told it nor believed it The case is, that every nation of people has been world-makers, and the Israelites had as much right to set up the trade of world-making as any of the rest; and as Moses was not an Israelite, he might not choose to contradict the tradition. The account, however, is harmless; and this is more than can be said of many other parts of the Bible. Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel. We scarcely meet with anything, a few phrases excepted, but what deserves either our abhorrence or our contempt, till we come to the miscellaneous parts of the Bible. In the anonymous publications, the Psalms, and the Book of Job, more particularly in the latter, we find a great deal of elevated sentiment reverentially expressed of the power and benignity of the Almighty; but they stand on no higher rank than many other compositions on similar subjects, as well before that time as since. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/paine/works/age-reason/ch01.htm