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Updated: June 24, 2025
The man whom his enemies stigmatized as atheist and renegade, was really in favor of toleration, and therefore, the more deeply criminal in the eyes of all religious parties. Events, personal to himself, were rapidly to place him in a position from which he might enter the combat with honor. His character had already been attacked, his property threatened with confiscation.
In spite of the taunts and jeers of his brethren, he publicly proclaimed that he would treat infidels with fairness and respect; that he would endeavor to convince them by argument and win them with love. He insisted that the God he worshipped loved the well-being even of an atheist. In this grand position he stood almost alone.
"Because," adds the same Voltaire, "if I were dealing with an atheist prince whose interest it might be to have me pounded in a mortar, I am very sure that I should be pounded." Strange aberration of a great mind! And if you were dealing with a pious prince, whose confessor, speaking in the name of God, should command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of being burned also?
Rameau distinguished amongst these the medecin des pauvres, the philosophical atheist, sundry young, long-haired artists, middle aged writers for the Republican press, in close neighbourhood with ruffians of villainous aspect, who might have been newly returned from the galleys.
If the serpent had not tempted Eve to break God's commandment, we should still be basking in Paradise." He looked at her curiously. "You believe that?" "Isn't it in the Bible?" she answered, seriously astonished. "Whatever the primitive Semitic allegorist may have thought, work is a blessing, not a curse." "Then you are an atheist!" Eileen recoiled from this strange young man.
He says: The word Atheist is a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term. It means one who does not believe in God, and it means neither more nor less. It implies neither blame nor approval, neither desert of punishment nor of reward.
But in this case, does not the theologian, according to his own assertion, acknowledge himself to be the true atheist? Does he not, in fact, circumscribe the attributes of the Deity, and deny his power, to suit his own purpose? Yet these men demand implicit belief in doctrines, which they are obliged to maintain by the most contradictory assertions.
For groping however dimly and hesitatingly towards the idea of religious liberty, of general toleration, he was denounced as a Papist, an atheist, a traitor, a miscreant, by the fanatics for the sacerdotal and personal power. Yet it was a pity that he could never contemplate the possibility of his country's throwing off the swaddling clothes of provincialism which had wrapped its infancy.
The essence of things, and the immutable laws of nature, are not subject to fluctuate; it is imperative with the atheist, as he is facetiously called by the theologian, to call whatever injures himself either vice or folly; to designate that which injures others, crime; to describe all that is advantageous to society, every thing which contributes to its permanent happiness, virtue.
Hattie says people look down on her terribly because of it. She says the church folks consider them, the Simpsons, that is, the dust on their shoes, and the crumbs off the rich man's table. She got that terribly mixed up, but I didn't correct her." "I think she did very well for an atheist," said Carol, determined not to be totally overlooked in this discussion.
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