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Title: What is an Atheist? Author: Sylvain Maréchal Date: 1799 Language: en Topics: atheist, religion, utopian Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/revolution/marechal/1799/preliminary-discourse.htm
There was not always a God. There was a time when a man, living with his
family, knew no other authority than that of his father. He had few
needs because he had few desires. He wasnât a brute, a barbarian, or an
eater of men, as we have been led to believe. Nor was he a polished and
false city-dweller, vain and servile: he was a man in all his plenitude,
ignorant of the art of writing, perhaps even that of speaking, but
knowing how to live; that is, he loved his father, his wife and his
children. He worked for them, with them and died in their embrace. In
his eyes his fields were the entire universe. Regulating his occupations
by the sunâs movements and the earthâs fecundity, his arms and his heart
comprised his entire fortune and pleasure. Suspecting nothing beneath
the vegetal layer of the soil he cultivated, man of that time was a
stranger to sciences and vices, to social virtues and crimes, but was
entirely given over to nature, to innocence.
Travelers have found a few faint traces of the golden age: it is not a
chimera. Poets have rendered its existence doubtful by loading it with
factitious ornaments, but that happy age once shone.
Why should we feel any repugnance about believing such things? Are they
in the realm of the possible? Is it so difficult to live in this way?
And isnât the current existence of humankind even more astonishing?
At that time man, limited to the surface of heaven and earth, neither
had nor could he have had any idea of any power other than that which
put him on earth and raised him. Do we think about something we have no
need of? And what need do we have of a God when we have a father, a
wife, children, a friend, arms, eyes and a heart?
But a true atheist is the man of the golden age. The atheist is he who,
retreating into himself and freeing himself from the ties he has been
forced to contract, or that were made unbeknownst to him, retreats from
civilization to that former state of humanity and, in the forum of his
conscience, laying low all prejudices of every color, approaches as
nearly as possible that fortunate time when there was no suspicion of
the divine existence, where all was well, where we contented ourselves
strictly with family obligations. The atheist is the man of nature.
Nevertheless, placed today in a more complicated and narrow sphere he
fulfills his obligations as a citizen and resigns himself to the decrees
of necessity. While groaning about the vicious bases of political
institutions, while striking with contempt those who so poorly organize
them, he submits to the public order of the place he lives. But we donât
find him becoming chief of a party or of opinion. We never meet him on
the banal road that leads to useful or brilliant posts. Consistent with
his principles, he lives among his corrupted or corrupting
contemporaries like the voyager who, having to traverse muddy beaches,
protects himself from the venom of reptiles. He gets off with only being
deafened by their insults. He goes his way among these evil beings
without taking on their tortuous and servile allure.
The true atheist is thus not the sybarite who, taking himself for an
epicurean when he is nothing but a debauchee, doesnât fear to say deep
in his worn-out heart: âThere is no God, thus there is nor morality, so
I can permit myself everything.â
The true atheist is not the statesman who, knowing that the divine
chimera was imagined to frighten the men of the people, commands them in
the name of a God he has no use of.
The true atheist cannot be found among those hypocritical and bloody
heroes who, in order to open a path to conquest, announce themselves as
the protectors of the cult they profess to the nations they propose to
tame, and who when among their families amuse themselves on the subject
of human credulity.
The true atheist is not that vile man who, condemned for many years for
his indelible character as a sacerdotal imposter, changes his habit and
opinions when this infamous métier ceases to be lucrative and impudently
ranges himself among the sages he persecuted.
The true atheist is not that hot-head who goes around the crossroads
smashing all the religious signs he meets and preaches the cult of
reason to a plebe graced only with instinct.
The true atheist is not one of those men of the world, or men comme il
faut who, through snobbery, disdain the use of thought and more or less
live like the horse they mount, or the women they keep.
Nor is the true atheist seated in the chairs of those scientific
societies whose members ceaselessly lie to their consciences and agree
to hide their thoughts and to inhibit the solemn march of philosophy in
order to advance their miserable personal interests or for pitiful
political considerations.
The true atheist is not the proud semi-savant who wants there to be no
other atheist than himself in the world, and who would cease to be one
if most people became so. For him the mania for standing out in the
crowd takes the place of a philosophy. Self-love is his God. If he could
heâd see to it that enlightenment belonged only to him; to hear him
speak, the rest of humanity is not worthy of it.
Nor is the true atheist that timorous philosopher lacking in energy who
blushes about his opinion as if it were an evil thought. A cowardly
friend of truth he would sooner compromise it than compromise himself.
We see him haunting temples in order to cast aside any suspicion of
impiety. An egoist who carries circumspection to the point of
pusillanimity, he always finds the time to be premature for the
extirpation of the most ancient prejudices. He doesnât fear God, but men
frighten him. It makes no difference to him that they destroy each other
in civil and religious wars, as long as he lives sheltered from harm and
in peace.
Nor is the true atheist that systematic physician who only rejects God
in order to have the glory of fabricating the world at his leisure, with
no other assistance than that of his imagination.
The true atheist is not he who says: âNo, I donât want a God.â Rather it
is he who says: âI can be wise without a God.â
The true atheist doesnât reason with great argumentative skill against
divine existence. On the contrary, the weakest theologians could
embarrass him if he crossed swords with them. But he could say to them
with bonhomie and to close the discussion:
âDoctors, is there a God in heaven? For me that question is no more
important than this one: Are there animals on the moon? Here is my
motto, in one line, doctors:
âI have no more need of a God than he of me.â
â Sylvain, the French Lucretius
âWhat difference does a God make to me? My thoughts go no further than
that which strikes my senses and I donât push my curiosity so far as to
want to find in the heavens yet another master: I already meet enough of
them on earth. Believing that there is something beyond the all of which
I am a part is repugnant to my reason. But if this object were to exist
he would be perfectly foreign to me. What is the relationship between
us? Enclosed within the limits of the universe in which I live, that
which happens among my neighbors is no concern of mine. It is not my
affair. The doorway to my house is for me the columns of Hercules. There
is quite a distance between man and what we call a God. I am too
near-sighted to see that far. It is difficult to get along at such a
great distance. In any event, I have everything I need right at hand:
rights to exercise, duties to fulfill, and pleasures, the results of my
duties and rights. The heartâs most tender affections and the sweetest
illusions of the sprit find around me, in me, and at every instant of my
life, nourishment taken from the nature of things. I donât have a moment
to waste. Every season of my existence offers me varied subjects for
contentment. Newborn I have my motherâs breast; a young man I throw
myself into the arms of another me. In my old age my children render me
the care they received from me.
âSurrounded, embraced by my parents, my wife, my children, my friend,
where is there room for God? He has no place in a united family. We
donât at all feel the necessity. A good son, a good husband, a good
father lacks for nothing.
âIf I meet with no reward I go down into the depths of my heart, close
myself in and find there ample recompense for the pains I suffer
outside, for the losses I feel at my side, for injustices, for the
persecutions of the wicked, who are more to be pitied than I.
âI know how to find all I need within myself, without any effort. All my
means are at my disposal. I envelop myself in the memory of my good
works and rely on my conscience without begging for help above my head,
in the clouds.
âDoctors, if your God exists or not you can see that man, if he knows to
question himself and knows how to appreciate his personal and internal
resources, has no need to go outside of himself to taste happiness, the
fruit of his virtue. The happiness of honest men is always their own
work. They owe nothing to anyone.
âDoctors, keep your God. I can do without him.â
Some good souls take pity on atheists: âThe unfortunates (they say).
They cannot be well either in this world or the next. Hope, this balm of
life, has been taken from them. They have a narrow sprit, a dry soul.
They donât know how to love, the unfortunates!â
The heart that didnât love was the first Atheist.
â L. Mercier
Good people! Donât fret about the lot of atheists. They donât in the
least envy your enjoyments. They have their own that are more real and
purer. Not worrying about the past that is no longer, or the future,
which is not yet, limited to the present, which alone belongs to them,
their interest is in the best possible use of their time. They take
their rule of conduct from nature, which knows no lacunae and is never
wrong.
Good people, donât fret on their account. Good, true atheists are more
dependable lovers, spouses, and friends than other men. They feel and
they enjoy with more energy. Present life being all for them they work
at getting the most advantage from it. And experience has taught them
that that they canât abuse it without first harming themselves.
âCertainly, but leave us our God!â
Good people, what do you want with him? What good is he to you? From
what evils does he preserve you? After having left you under royal
despotism for twelve centuries was your almighty God able to defend you
from anarchy? If your God mixes in your affairs why do they go so
poorly? Why do you have altars and no morals? Why so many priests and so
few honest men? If your almighty God contents himself on high in a
perfect neutrality, then tell me, good people here below, is it not then
as if you have no God? Are atheists so wrong, are they so criminal when
they see to their own salvation? Keep your God, but donât find it evil
if atheists donât needlessly multiply beings. And above all, rid
yourselves of all unjust prejudices in their regard.
Atheists, who they once used to frighten, and still today frighten women
and big and small children with, are the best people in the world. They
donât form a corporation, like priests; they donât make propaganda. In
fact, they donât offend anyone.
The repertoire of ancient and modern atheists will at last prove that
most of them are, of all men, the most tolerant, the most peaceful, the
most enlightened, and the most loving. They are also the happiest.
Compare the character and the habits of the man without God to the
habits and character of the man of God. Is there a more perfect
contrast?
Observe the latter: he continuously lives in fear and humiliation, like
a slave kissing the whip that strikes him.
If he carries out a good act, instead of giving himself over to a
legitimate pride he is foolish enough to attribute all the merit, all
the honor to a master who dictated it to him. If he proposes a generous
resolution he demands the grace and the permission to accomplish it. A
weak child, he doesnât dare put a foot in front of the other without
looking over at papa God (forgive us the familiarity of the expression,
but it is perfectly accurate). Look at how the deist, the theist, the
religious man of any sect lowers his head, closes his eyes, joins his
hands, extends his arms, bends the knee when he pronounces the word
âGod.â Are there any terms more abject or more foolish than those he
uses in his invocations? If he loses his wife or children he thanks his
divine creator, for nothing happens without his orders, and itâs always
for the best. On his deathbed, like a criminal, he trembles at the
approach of the supreme judge. The idea of a generous or vengeful God
prevents him from giving himself over to natureâs final effusions. He
coldly casts his family and friends aside in order to prepare himself to
appear before the celestial tribunal. Of course such an existence is a
perpetual torture and realizes in this life the hell of the other world.
The man without God has and maintains a completely different attitude.
Let us follow him on one of the days of his life. He leaves his wifeâs
arms or wakes up to order to view the rise of the great star, and then
he sets in order his household affairs and his labors. After having
given his children their first lessons he takes the morning meal with
his family. Afterwards, each works at his own occupations and
commitments. They get together again at midday I order to recuperate the
strength worn out by their labors and to gaily prepare themselves for
new fatigues. Exercising his natural and acquired faculties the man
without God doesnât know boredom. Every hour procures for him an
observation to be made, a service to be rendered. An indispensable part
of nature, and as active as it, he coordinates himself with it so as to
fulfill the duties imposed on him by his relations with others. The
evening come, he passes peaceful moments in the midst of his family,
with a friend, and allows himself to relax, the well-earned salary of a
productive and useful day. Gentle rest awaits him during the night. He
falls asleep, satisfied that he left no void in his day, modeled on the
sunâs path.
And when he reaches the term of his existence? He gathers all his
strength in order to enjoy the pleasures that remain to him and then
closes his eyes forever, but with the certainty of leaving an honorable
and cherished memory in the hearts of his kin, from whom he receives the
final testimonies of esteem and attachment. His role finished, he
peacefully retires from the scene in order to make room for other actors
who will take him as their model. He doubtless feels lively regret for
the separation from all he loved, but reason tells him that such is the
immutable order of things. In any event, he knows that he doesnât
entirely die. A father is eternal. He is reborn, he lives again in each
of his children, and even in pieces of his body: nothing of him is
obliterated. An indestructible link in the great chain of beings, the
man without God embraces everything in thought and finds consolation in
this, knowing that passing away is nothing but a displacement of matter
and a change in form. At the moment he leaves life remembers, if he has
the time, the good he did, as well as his faults. Proud of his
existence, he has only bended his knee before the author of his days. He
has walked on the earth, his head high and with a firm step, the equal
of every other being and only owing accounts to his conscience. His life
is as full as nature: Ecce Vir.
If the narrow framework in which we are circumscribed allowed us to
profit from all the advantages of our subject, we would teach certain
people that atheists are trustworthy in commerce, gentle and calm in
society, that they alone know how to enjoy with delicacy and in keeping
with natureâs wishes, which they consult before anything else. Among
them it is rare to meet fanatics or hypochondriacs. Happy and content,
they are easy to get along with because, knowing how short life is, they
prefer to pass it loving each other rather than in disputes or hatred.
This is why they donât see anything wrong in thinking differently from
them. Philosophers without any pretensions, they arenât angered by
insults, even those habitually cast at them by men of God. They look
upon them as ill-bred children.
If some of the atheists who names are gathered in the âDictionaryâ were
to return to the world what would we not do to be admitted to their
company, to share their easy and remorse-free happiness? Who among us
would regret his day if he had passed the first hours of it in the
school of Pythagoras or Aristotle, then accepted Anacreonâs, Luctreiusâ
or Chaulieuâs hospitality. And then, after having strolled in Epicurusâ
or Helvetiusâ garden allows himself to be surprised by the night between
Aspasian and Ninon.
Without any consideration for these illustrious names, they say to us:
âNothing less than a God, or the idea of a God, is needed to fill the
void in manâs heart, to occupy his thoughts. He who doesnât believe is
necessarily more ambitious, more boisterous. Itâs only by achieving
honors or material pleasures that he can get by and exist on earth
without disgust.â
Let us answer this.
He who is an atheist through reason feels more than others the
worthlessness of these social distinctions, these vulgar pleasures that
most men are so vain and jealous of. A careful observer, an enlightened
friend of nature, he needs great objects to feed his imagination. He
looks with pity and affliction on those political or religious crises
that torment the mass of men for the profit of a handful of wretches
whose entire talent lies in the audacity of crime. These are nothing but
atrocious and shameful spectacles in which the atheist refuses to play a
role.
Sometimes vengeance is taken for his disdain by covering him in insults.
It is here that we can admire the influence of liberal opinion on the
character and existence of man. The atheist who has come to think in
this way by studying the nature of things has necessarily placed himself
above them. Filled with his own dignity he submits his reason to no
other authority than that of evidence. Atheism inspires sentiments of
elevation and independence to a degree unattainable in any other system.
"A God is necessary for the people. The people need one to learn to be
docile before their leaders. And these leaders canât do without one in
order to ease their tasks of administration."
We answer: God is useful to neither those who are governed nor those who
govern. For many years he has made no impression on the spirit of the
former. The people arenât so stupid as not to see that God is nothing
but a brake used by those who tyrannize them. Daily experience has
rudely awakened them to the truth of this.
In any event, in a population of 100,000, there are perhaps not fifty
who have taken the trouble to reason out their beliefs. The people
accept them without question. They are Catholic, just as theyâd be
atheist, if their ancestors had been so. God resembles those old
articles of furniture which, far from being useful, are only in the way
but which are passed on in families and are religiously kept, because
the son received it from the father, and the father from his ancestor.
We insist and we say: a God and his priests are as necessary as a police
magistrate and his spies.
Whatever the perversity of men in civilization a good correctional
tribunal suffices for all causes. Dual employments harm each other,
paralyze each other reciprocally. The counter-police of priests is never
as good as the active surveillance of spies.
It is at long last time to smash these old politico-religious gears that
everyone agrees are insufficient and so little favorable to human
perfectibility.
But here is the most atrocious and most gratuitous of imputations
against men without God:
Atheism (they dare to say) demoralizes civil society.
âHoly choler of virtue, guide my pen a moment...â
Priests of a God fruit of adultery you dare say to us that atheism
demoralizes!...
And you, theist adorers of an all-powerful providence that has permitted
the bloody immoralities of a ten-year long revolution, you too say that
atheism demoralizes!
And you too, statesmen, you permit yourselves to become the complacent
echoes of priests and you say along with them: âAtheism demoralizes the
people.â You who every day allow conjugal faith to be ridiculed on all
the stages of the land; you who lay a trap for the unfortunate with your
lotteries ... This is what truly demoralizes the people. A people loses
its morality with priests who sanctify adultery in their liturgy, with
semi-philosophers who preach a providence complicit in the crimes he
permits ...
Thinkers who are either inconsistent or in bad faith: was it atheism
that reigned at the court of our last three monarchical masters, Louis
XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI?
Was it atheism that dominated the Convention, with Robespierre the
persecutor of atheists?
Was it atheism that founded the Inquisition; that covered America with
corpses, that ordered the Saint Bartholomewâs Day Massacre, and which,
in the Vendee, commits all kinds of crimes?
Is it a coalition of atheists, that of the crowned powers that carries
the plague of a war of extermination all over Europe?
Were St. Dominic, Charles IX, and Maria de Medicis atheists? Were
Ferdinand, George III, Francois II, and Paul I atheists? Was the mother
of the latter an atheist? Are Pitt and Maury? Are the French émigrés who
turn their swords against their mothersâ breasts?
Studious Bayle! Virtuous Spinoza! Wise Freret! Modest Dumarsais! Honest
Helvetius! Sensible Holbach! Etc. All of you philosophers who only
rejected God so as to bring forth an unalloyed morality! You demoralized
the world?
Is the atheist to be looked upon like the scapegoat who the Hebrews
charged with all their iniquities?
It is for the amusement of idlers and the education of fools that the
coryphées of bas empire of French literature enjoy themselves in both
prose and verse at the expense of the atheism of those who profess it.
We will only reply to them by burying them in the imposing names and the
authority of those in the âDictionary.â These praise-worthy names should
at least make them more circumspect. A moral opinion professed by so
many great and good men deserves to be spoken of in more measured tones.
This mass of suffrages should carry some weight in the scale of the
undecided.
We have gathered not only the principal sentiments of known atheists,
but also an infinite number of testimonies in their favor. Testimonies
worthy of even more credence because they come from the mouths or pens
of their adversaries.
We have surprised several theologians stating maxims much more
philosophical than they had thought, rendering homage to the purity of
conduct and intention of men without God.
It should also be said that many honest citizens and learned men are
atheists without believing that they are so. This is because they
havenât yet learned to draw the consequences of and apply certain
principles that they profess.
Let us add that if there had never been rogues or unfortunates on earth
we would never have thought to look for a God in the heavens.
Our descendants will not be able to read certain pages of our annals
without asking: were men differently organized than us in those times?
What did they do with their reason? What a pity that they placed so much
importance on pronouncing the word God!
Regeneration is spoken of, a new order. Great principles are announced,
vast plans, and profound insights. Ideologues treat their predecessors
as idiots, as shortsighted. And yet these men with their daring concepts
donât dare officially publish anything against the most absurd and
decrepit of prejudices. They propose the raising of an edifice of the
most sublime proportions, yet they seem to respect the Gothic ruins that
they fear to deliver a decisive blow to. They allow humanity to remain
prostrated at the feet of its ancient fetish instead of saying to it,
with all the authority of reason: âRise up and march with giant steps
towards happiness.â Following the timid counsels of a false policy they
accord public asylum to both sacerdotal imposture and philosophy.
Statesmen would be mortified if we thought them religious, but it
doesnât bother them that everyone except them be so.
They say: âIt is not yet time to take God from the people.â
What are you waiting for? Fear the results of semi-enlightenment.
Everything must be told the people, or nothing. A people only half
enlightened is the most detestable of peoples. You will never make
anything of them. But this is perhaps your intention. If all nations
have unanimously recognized a God distinct from matter, and dedicated a
cult to him, the wise men of all centuries and all countries have only
recognized matter working on its own.
Going over our nomenclature we can see these two extremes touch. We see
the theologian and the philosopher walk in opposite directions in order
to arrive at the same goal. The spiritualist and the materialist draw
similar results from their opposing arguments. God is nature to the eyes
of the body; nature is God to the eyes of understanding. Matter or
abstraction, the divinity is all or it is nothing. And those who speak
of it are either Spinozists or Don Quixotes.
It is to be hoped that the reading of the âDictionary of Ancient and
Modern Atheistsâ will lead its readers to say:
âWhy spill so much ink, bile and blood? God can have his moment of
utility during the childhood of political bodies. Now that humanity has
reached maturity we no longer need that old leash. Freed, we will know
how to reduce to their just value those brilliant, vehement speeches.
The useful, the good, the true will obtain preference in our spirits
over the superb flights of imagination and vanity. Agitated men who
meditate coups dâĂ©tat, deep thinkers who want to carry out revolutions
in the empire of ideas, or apply their sublime theories to statistics,
will meet sensible men along the way, walking with nature and reason,
imperturbable enemies of both political and religious abstractions. With
religion, simplified and reduced to filial piety, we will also want to
simplify our civil institutions. The entire diplomatic apparatus will
appear to us as a gigantic piece of childishness. All of those numerous
gears of social government, which resemble ancient hydraulic machines
will be reduced to less complicated movements. We will act in a fashion
contrary to our superstitious ancestors, who made little of much. Rid as
we will then be of all the petty considerations that were necessary up
till now in order not to bump up against venerable and ancient errors,
we will say, parodying an expression of Ninonâs: âA government must be
quite poor in enlightenment and resources when it thinks it has to come
to terms with religious prejudices.ââ
Such will be the revolution carried out by atheism. Such, we repeat,
will be the influence of that liberal opinion on spirits and
institutions. The full and complete destruction of a long and imposing
error that mixed in with everything, that denatured everything, even
virtue; that was a trap or the weak, a lever for the powerful, and a
barrier before men of genius. The destruction of that long and imposing
error will change the face of the world.
While waiting for this great event, which is so feared by those who live
on lies, and which the sterile vows of the wise call for but canât
hasten, we say to our perplexed contemporaries:
âGod has for him ignorance and imposture, fear and despotism, and
against him reason and philosophy, the study of nature and the love of
independence. God owes his birth to misunderstanding. He only exists
through the charm of words: the knowledge of things kills and
obliterates him. Good sense rejects the idea of a corporeal God. An
abstract God has no hold on it. And yet God can only be abstraction or
matter. It must again be repeated here: God is all or nothing. In order
to get along and to be understood, the theologian has to express himself
like the philosopher. But if everything is God, then God loses his
divinity. On the other hand, ceding to his spirituality, he only exists
in the thought of man. We can understand the embarrassment of the
schools, constructing on imaginary spaces and with words that have no
meaning, or who destroy the ghost when they do. Alas, all the sacred
wars that bloody the pages of history are then nothing but grammatical
quarrels. Blush for your fathers, who lost themselves in miserable
theological questions. Burn those dusty libraries that only attest to
the delirium and shame of the human spirit. Lifeâs brevity doesnât leave
you enough leisure to waste your fleeting moments in gratuitous
conjectures or suppositions.
âUp till the present you have only lived on fictions. Your very laws are
still full of them. Man needs something more substantial. Leave aside
all that doesnât rest on nature and the evidence of things.
âA modern legislator (Porcher) dared to say, in a moment of openness:
âOpium should be administered to three quarters of men.â
âMay this statement dissipate your long sleep. It is only too true: up
till today men have only been governed by administering them religious
and other soporifics. From here on in, close your ears not only to
priests, but also to any statesman who speaks and acts like a priest.
âThree talismanic words were enough to make religions and revolutions.
This must no longer occur. You must no longer present â or at least
suffer â such spectacles and scandals. Reject all these systems that are
the cause or the result of them. Has not everything already been said on
the subject of divine science and politics? Pass now to positive objects
that truly touch you. Do you not have domestic morality and traditional
experience.
âTwo books are open to you, your hearts and nature. Think on them above
all else. Think about how any other kind of study is petty and pitiful,
wasteful and uncertain compared to that of the heart and nature. Only
they are real and useful, good and beautiful. Give yourselves over to
the results of observation and experience, and to the sweetness of the
sentiments of reciprocal benevolence. Place all that has been said and
done about God and diplomacy in parallel with the labors of agriculture
and family duties. How pitiful and wretched is the profound
metaphysician who passes his time in his dusty study in order to make
books with other books, compared to the atheist exercising his
intellectual and physical faculties under natureâs eye and enjoying the
purest pleasures, the result of a healthy organization. How thin and
ridiculous is the grave publicist next to the laborer, head of a family
and having the good sense to be nothing but that, and who relies on the
light of his good sense! It is to this that man must sooner or later
return.
âLeave God aside. God is of no use to you...God is of no use to man.
âLearn from your fathersâ errors. Donât, like them, sacrifice things to
words. Look after your own affairs. Keep an eye on those among you
charged with taking care of your external interests. Your agents arenât
bothered that the crowd keeps its gaze raised to heaven. While it is
looking there, it doesnât see what is going on on earthâ
The idea of a God making up in another world for the tyrannies put up
with in this one, imprinted on the brain of the ruled, is a comfortable
pillow for the head of the rulers.
A republic of atheists would give its supreme administrators less
latitude. Atheists are clear-sighted and honest citizens and absolutely
refuse to recognize any other power than that of reason. Men like these
canât be led with sticks. One fears encountering them. Beautiful
exteriors donât impress them; beautiful promises donât satisfy them.
Itâs not to them that we can say: âBe patient, let the evil ones do as
they please. God allows them to reach the heights for a moment in order
to prepare a greater fall.â Atheists donât accept these reasonings. They
want to prevent evil; they want justice to be done to the first place
holder who does wrong. They want the law, present everywhere at the same
time and as prompt as lightning, to replace a hidden and slow-moving
God, who allows Cromwell and Monk to die in their beds.
Tolerant by taste and principle, atheists want the magistrate of a great
nation, by consecrating a law on the freedom of religion, to
nevertheless make felt the absurdity and the inconvenience of all
religions in his wise proclamations addressed to fathers and heads of
families.
âCitizens! (he could say to them) the freedom of religion is demanded,
and we wonât refuse it. But is it something good for those who so loudly
call for it? We donât think so, and we think it is our obligation to
share our doubts with you. We canât forbid the sale of arsenic by
pharmacists. But fathers and heads of family, we ask you in the name of
good morals and holy truth, in the name of public and private interest,
to join your nature to the enlightenment given by all those who were
truly wise and preserve the rising generation from the religious
contagion.
âMake your children and your dependents feel that they are being fooled,
that they owe nothing to a being high above their understanding; that
their sole duties are the love of labor and the laws, the recognition of
the authors of their days and their instruction. Fathers and heads of
family! Accustom your children and your servants to only see in you
ministers of morality; to see as their only altars the places where they
received life and education, to only confess their faults to you, to
only consult you. Finally, to find in you and you alone their God and
their priests.
âHeads of family! Reclaim your rights. The only brake a free people
requires is laws and morals.
âGood mothers! Be your childrenâs providence. May your daughters virtues
be your work. Donât join strangers to your august functions. A well-born
daughter should never leave her mother for an instant. It is indecent to
see a young virgin kneel at the feet of a man who is not her father to
confess to him her domestics errors. There is a universal religion that
is previous to all the others and that will survive them: filial piety.
This is the only natural religion. The paternal household is its
temple...â
But such means are slow. Entering into agreement with falsehood,
attacking it only with proclamations, promises a victory for truth in a
few centuries. I like to think that one day, perhaps soon, a pure man
will rise, joining to the sparkle of his intelligence, to the ascendant
of his virtues all the strength of a great character.
For many centuries almost all countries have been dissatisfied with
their condition. They call on a supernatural being who must come to
earth in order to change, or at least ameliorate, the state of things.
At Delphi they prophesied the coming of a son of Apollo who would bring
the reign of justice to man.
The Romans waited for a king predicted by their Sybils. The Indians wait
for Vishnu, who will appear to them in the form of a centaur. The
Persians wait for Ali, the Chinese for Felo. The Japanese wait for
Peâirum and Karbadoxi, and the Siamese for Sammonocodon. The Hebrews
think yet about their Messiah. The Christians believe in a second visit
from Jesus, in the fearful guise of a severe judge from whom there is no
appeal.
The moralists, the philosophers themselves, hope for the appearance of a
man daring to openly speak the whole truth.
May he be proclaimed the benefactor of humanity, the wise legislator who
will find the secret of erasing from manâs brains the word âGod,â
sinister talisman that has caused so many crimes and so much evil!
What is an atheist?
The true atheist is a modest and peaceful philosopher who doesnât like
to make noise and who doesnât show off his principles with a puerile
ostentation, atheism being of all things in the world the most natural,
the most simple.
Without arguing either for or against divine existence, the atheist goes
straight to his goal and does for it what others do for their God. It
isnât so as to please the divinity that he practices virtue, but in
order to be right with himself.
Too proud to obey anyone, even a God, the atheist takes orders only from
his conscience.
The atheist has a treasure to guard, and thatâs his honor. A man who
respects himself knows what he must forbid pr permit himself and would
blush at the idea of taking advice or following a model.
The atheist is an honorable man. He would be ashamed to owe to a God a
good work he can do for himself and in his own name. He doesnât like to
be pushed to do good, or turned away from evil: he seeks the one and
avoids the other of his own will, and we can depend upon him.
How many good acts have been attributed to God that had as their only
principle the heart of the great man who produced them?
The most perfect disinterest is the basis for all the resolutions of the
atheist. He knows he has rights and obligations. He exercises the first
without complaint, and the others without constraint. Order and justice
are his divinities, and he makes free sacrifices only to them:
âThe wise man alone has the right to be an atheist.â