Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under diverse names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty.
BARON D'HOLBACHPeople have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn’t it be better to depend on blind matter… than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent.
More Baron d'Holbach Quotes
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If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.
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The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals.
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All religious notions are uniformly founded on authority; all the religions of the world forbid examination, and are not disposed that men should reason upon them.
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The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal. The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son.
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The inward persuasion that we are free to do, or not to do a thing, is but a mere illusion. If we trace the true principle of our actions, we shall find, that they are always necessary consequences of our volitions and desires, which are never in our power.
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Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all.
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The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation, nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.
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All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.
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If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven’s cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violencess. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.
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It is thus superstition infatuates man from his infancy, fills him with vanity, and enslaves him with fanaticism.
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If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
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Can theology give to the mind the ineffable boon of conceiving that which no man is in a capacity to comprehend? Can it procure to its agents the marvellous faculty of having precise ideas of a god composed of so many contradictory qualities?
BARON D'HOLBACH -
Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.
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The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.
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When we examine the opinions of men, we find that nothing is more uncommon, than common sense; or, in other words, they lack judgment to discover plain truths, or to reject absurdities, and palpable contradictions.
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Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination.
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It is very strange that men should deny a Creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.
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These principles, universally recognized, are at fault when the question of the existence of God is considered; what has been said of Him is either unintelligible or perfectly contradictory; and for this reason must appear impossible to every man.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
In Nature nothing; is mean or contemptible, and it is only pride, originating in a false idea of our superiority, which causes our contempt for some of her productions. In the eyes of Nature, however, the oyster that vegetates at the bottom of the sea is as dear and perfect as the proud biped who devours it.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn’t it be better to depend on blind matter… than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
The source of man’s unhappiness is his ignorance of Nature.
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It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of religion that we shall discover truth, reason and morality.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
You think yourself free, because you do what you will; but are you free to will, or not to will; to desire, or not to desire? Are not your volitions and desires necessarily excited by objects or qualities totally independent of you?
BARON D'HOLBACH -
Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he can not break free, he can not leave even in thought; it is in vain that his spirit wants to soar beyond the bounds of the visible world, he is always forced to return.
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Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.
BARON D'HOLBACH -
All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance and ferocity.
BARON D'HOLBACH