l piles, committing without scruple, as a
matter of duty, the greatest crimes. Why? To maintain or to propagate
the impertinent conjectures of enthusiasts, or to sanction the knaveries
of impostors on account of a being who exists only in their imagination,
and who is known only by the ravages, the disputes, and the follies
which he has caused upon the earth.

Originally, savage nations, ferocious, perpetually at war, adored, under
various names, some God conformed to their ideas; that is to say, cruel,
carnivorous, selfish, greedy of blood. We find in all the religions of
the earth a God of armies, a jealous God, an avenging God, an
exterminating God, a God who enjoys carnage and whose worshipers make it
a duty to serve him to his taste. Lambs, bulls, children, men, heretics,
infidels, kings, whole nations, are sacrificed to him. The zealous
servants of this barbarous God go so far as to believe that they are
obliged to offer themselves as a sacrifice to him. Everywhere we see
zealots who, after having sadly meditated upon their terrible God,
imagine that, in order to please him, they must do themselves all the
harm possible, and inflict upon themselves, in his honor, all imaginable
torments. In a word, everywhere the baneful ideas of Divinity, far from
consoling men for misfortunes incident to their existence, have filled
the heart with trouble, and given birth to follies destructive to them.
How could the human mind, filled with frightful phantoms and guided by
men interested in perpetuating its ignorance and its fear, make
progress? Man was compelled to vegetate in his primitive stupidity; he
was preserved only by invisible powers, upon whom his fate was supposed
to depend. Solely occupied with his alarms and his unintelligible
reveries, he was always at the mercy of his priests, who reserved for
themselves the right of thinking for him and of regulating his conduct.

Thus man was, and always remained, a child without experience, a slave
without courage, a loggerhead who feared to reason, and who could never
escape from the labyrinth into which his ancestors had misled him; he
felt compelled to groan under the yoke of his Gods, of whom he knew
nothing except the fabulous accounts of their ministers. These, after
having fettered him by the ties of opinion, have remained his masters or
delivered him up defenseless to the absolute power of tyrants, no less
terrible than the Gods, of whom they were the representatives u