Translation:Treaty of the Three Fraudsters/Chapter 2
CHAPTRE II.
Of the reasons that have pushed men to imagine an invisible Being commonly named God
§. 1.
Those who ignore physical causes have a natural fear which emerges from worry and doubt whether there exists a Being or power to harm or preserve. Hence their inclination to feign invisible causes, which are only Ghosts of their imagination, which they invoke in adversity and which they praise in prosperity. They make Gods out of them in the end, and this illusional fear of invisible powers is the source of the Religions, each forming their own fear. The religions that contained and arrested people by similar reveries kept this seed of religion, made it a law and eventually, by the terrors of the future, reduced the people to blind obedience.
§. 2.
Humans believed that the source of the Gods was their similarity to humans. They did all things like humans to some end. Therefore, believers unanimously say and believe that God has done nothing except for humans, and conversely that nothing has been done except for God. This prejudice is general. When we reflect on its influence on the morals and opinions of humans, we clearly see that Gods took occasion there to form false ideas the of good and evil, of the merit and demerit, of the honor and shame, of the order and confusion, of the beauty and deformity, and other such things.
§. 3.
Everyone must stay assured that all humans are born into a profound ignorance, and that the only natural thing is to look for what is useful and advantageous. Hence: (1) we believe that it is enough to be free to feel for oneself that one can want and wish without being at all concerned about the causes which dispose one to want and wish, because one does not know them; (2) as humans do nothing except to an end of their preference, and their only aim is to know the final causes of their actions, and they imagine that after that they no longer have any subject of doubt, and as they find within themselves and outside themselves several means of achieving what they propose, seeing that they have, for example, a sun to enlighten them, etc., they concluded that there is nothing in nature which is not made for them, and which they cannot enjoy and dispose of; but as humans knew that it is not they who made all these things, they believed themselves well founded in imagining a supreme being as author of everything, in a word, they thought that everything that exists was the work of one or more Deities. On the other hand, humans judged for themselves the nature of the Gods that humans have admitted being unknown to them. They imagined that these unknown Gods were susceptible to the same passions as humans; and as the inclinations of humans are different, they worshiped a Divinity according to their mood, with the view of attracting its blessing and thereby making it serve all nature to their desires.
§. 4.
This is the way that prejudice has changed into superstition. It has gotten embedded in such a way that the rudest people believed themselves capable of penetrating into the final causes, as if they had a complete knowledge. Hence, instead of illustrating that nature does nothing in vain, they believed that God and nature thought like humans. Experience having made it known that an infinite number of calamities disturb the sweetness of life, such as storms, earthquakes, diseases, hunger, thirst, etc., all these evils were attributed to the heavenly wrath. The Divinity was believed to be irritated against the offenses of humans, who were unable to remove a similar illusion from their heads, nor to disabuse themselves of these prejudices by the daily examples which show that goods and evils have always been common to the well and the bad. This error emerges from the fact that it was easier to remain in their natural ignorance than to abolish a prejudice received for centuries and to establish something possible.
§. 5.
This prejudice led them to another, which is to believe that God's judgments were incomprehensible. For this reason the knowledge of the truth was beyond the powers of the human spirit; the error where we would still be, if mathematics, physics and some other sciences had not destroyed it.
§. 6.
Thou do not need to be a scientist to show that nature has no end, and that all final causes are nothing but human fictions. It is enough to show that this doctrine takes away the perfections attributed to the God. If God acts for an end, whether for himself or for some other, he desires what has no point. There is a time at which God does not have the object for which he acts but the wish to have it; which makes an indigent God. But so as not to omit anything that can support the reasoning of those who hold the opposite opinion; suppose for example, that a pot falls down from a building on a person and kills him, it is necessary, say our ignorant people, that this pot fell on purpose to kill this person, and this could only happen because God wanted it. If thou say that the wind caused this fall in the time of this poor unfortunate passing, they will ask thou why it was precisely at this moment that the wind was shaking the pot. Tell that the man was going for a supper with one of his friends who asked him for one, they will want to know why this friend had asked him for a supper at that time rather than at another. They will ask thou an infinite number of bizarre questions to shuffle back and forth from cause to cause and make thou admit that the sole will of God, which is the asylum of the ignorant, is the primary cause of the fall of this pot. Likewise, when they see the structure of the human body, they fall into admiration. Due to the fact that they are ignorant of the causes of the effects which appear so marvelous to them, they conclude that it is a supernatural effect, in which the causes known to humans can have no share. Hence, who wants to examine the works of creation in depth, and penetrate into their natural causes like a true scholar, without enslaving himself to the prejudices formed by ignorance, passes for an ungodly person, and, if otherwise, is soon decried by malice of those whom the vulgar recognizes as the interpreters of nature and the gods. These mercenary souls know very well that ignorance, which keeps the people surprised, is what makes them subsist and conserves their credit.
§. 7.
Having convinced themselves with the idea that whatever they see is created for them, humans made it a ridiculous point of Religion to apply everything to themselves and to judge things for their benefits. On this, humans formed the notions that served to explain the nature of things, to judge the good and evil, the order and disorder, the heat and cold, the beauty and beast, etc., which deep down are not what they imagine: masters of forming their ideas in this way, they flattered themselves to be free; they believed they had the right to decide on the praise and blame, the good and evil. They called good that which fits into their benefit and that which concerns divine worship, and evil, on the contrary, that which fits neither one nor the other. Ignorants are not capable of judging anything, and have no idea of things except through imagination, which they take for judgment. Therefore, they say that humans know nothing in nature, and imagine a particular order in the world. Eventually, they believe things to be well or badly ordered, according to whether they find it easy or difficult to imagine, when meaning represents them. Since humans are happy to stop at what exhausts the brain the least, we convince ourselves that we are well found in preferring order to confusion; as if order was something other than a pure effect of human imagination. Hence, to say that God created everything in order is to pretend that it was in favor of the human imagination that he created the world, in the most easily conceived way. The assertion that we know for certain the reports and ends of everything that exists is very absurd and deserves a serious refutation.
§. 8.
As for the other notions, they are an outturn of the same imagination, which have nothing real. They are only different affections or modes of which this faculty of imagination is susceptible. For example, we say that an object is beautiful when its move leaves an impression on the nerves through the eyes, which are pleasant to the senses. Smells are good or bad, flavors sweet or bitter, what is touched hard or soft, sounds harsh or sounds that strike or penetrate the senses. According to these ideas, people believe that God pleases in melody, while others believe that the celestial movements were a harmonious concert: which marks well that everyone is convinced that things are as God imagines them to be, or that the world is purely imaginary. It is therefore not surprising that there are barely two of the same opinion and that there are even some who praise doubting everything: for, although humans have the same body and they are all similar in much respect, they nevertheless differ in quite a few others. Hence what seems good to one becomes evil to another, that which pleases one displeases another. From here onwards, it is easy to conclude that affects differ due to the organization and diversity of co-existences where reasoning plays little part, and that notions of things of the world are nothing more than an outturn of the imagination.
§. 9.
Therefore, it is obvious that the reasons which commoners are used to using when they apply to explain nature are nothing but ways of imagining, which cannot show anything less than what they claim. We give names to these ideas, as if they existed elsewhere than in a prejudiced brain. We should call them illusions, not beings. With regard to arguments based upon these notions, nothing is easier than to refute them. For example: If it were true, we are told, that the universe was a flow and a necessary continuation of divine nature, where would the imperfections and defects that we notice there come from? This objection can be refuted without difficulty. We cannot judge the perfection and imperfection of a being unless we know its essence and nature, and it is a strange mistake to believe that a thing is more or less perfect according to whether it pleases or displeases, and whether it is useful or harmful to human nature. To refute the objection of why God did not create all humans good and happy, it is enough to say that everything is necessarily what it is, and that in nature there is nothing imperfect, since everything evolves from necessity.
§. 10.
That said, if we ask what is that, the God? I respond that this word represents the universal Being in which, as in Saint Paul's saying, we have life, movement, and being. This notion has nothing that is unworthy of God; because, if everything is God, everything necessarily follows from its essence. It absolutely must be such as what it contains, since it is incomprehensible that entirely material beings are maintained and contained in a being which is not. This opinion is not a new point. Tertullian, one of the most knowledgeable men that Christians have ever had, declared against Appelles that what is not corpora is nothing, and against Praxeas that all substance is corpora.[1] This doctrine, natheless, was not condemned in the first Councils.
§. 11.
These ideas are clear, simple and the only ones that a good spirit is able to form of the God. Natheless, there are few who are content with such simplicity. The vulgar people used to the flatteries of the senses demand a God who resembles the Kings of the earth. The ritual, the great splendor which envelops the kings, blinds them in such a way that it removes the idea of a God that approximately resembles to kings. It replaces the expectation of going to heaven with the increases in the number of celestial courtiers, enjoying the same pleasures that one tastes in the Court of Kings; which deprives humans of the only consolation which prevents them from despairing in the miseries of life. It is said that there must be a just and vengeful God who penalizes and rewards: we want a God susceptible of all human passions; we assign feet, hands, eyes and ears to the God, and yet, we do not want a God constituted in this way to have anything material. It is said that the human is the God's masterpiece and even his image, but we do not want the copy to be the same as the original. Finally, the God of the people today is subject to a lot more forms than the Jupiter of the Pagans. What is the weirdest is that the more these notions contradict each other and disturb common sense, the more the vulgar revere them, because they stubbornly believe what the Prophets said about them, though these visionaries were not among the Hebrews as were the augurs and soothsayers among the Pagans. We consult the Bible, as if God and nature explained themselves in a particular way. Although this book is only a few fragments brought together at various times, collected by various people and published by the consent of the Rabbis, who decided, according to their admission of what should be approved or rejected, that the book confirms or opposes the Law of Moses.
Such is the malice and stupidity of humans. They spend their lives quibbling and persist in respecting a book where there is hardly more order than in the Alcoran of Mohammad. A book, I say, that no one understands. It is so obscure and poorly designed that it only serves to foment divisions. Jews and Christians love to consult this grimoire than to listen to what the natural Law that God, that is to say Nature, the principle of all things, has written in the hearts of humans. All other laws are nothing but human fictions and pure illusions brought to light, not by the Demons or evil Spirits, who never existed except in idea, but by politics of Princes and Priests. The former wanted to give more weight to their authority, and the latter wanted to enrich themselves by spouting an infinite number of illusions that they sell dearly to the ignorant.
All the other laws which triumphed that of Moses, I mean the laws of the Christians, are only based on this Bible of which the original is not found, which contains supernatural and impossible things, which speaks of rewards and penalties for good or bad actions but which are only for the other life. Lest the deceit be discovered, no one having ever returned from it. Hence, the people, always floating between expectation and fear, are held back in their duty by their opinion that God only created humans to make them eternally happy or unhappy. This is what led to an infinite number of Religions.
- ↑ "Quis autem negabit Deum esse corpus, etsi deus spiritus? spiritus etiam corporis sui generis, in suâ effigie". Tertullian. adv. Pray. Cap. 7.