IT has been my intention, for several years
past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties
that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more
advanced period of life. I intended it to be the last offering I should make to
my fellow-citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the
motive that induced me to it could not admit of a question, even by those who
might disapprove the work.
The circumstance that has now taken place in
France, of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and
of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive
articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work
of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest, in the general wreck of superstition,
of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality,
of humanity, and of the theology that is true.
As several of my colleagues, and others of my
fellow-citizens of France, have given me the example of making their voluntary
and individual profession of faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with
all that sincerity and frankness with which the mind of man communicates with
itself.
I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope
for happiness beyond this life.
I believe the equality of man, and I believe
that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring
to make our fellow-creatures happy.
But, lest it should be supposed that I
believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of
this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not
believing them.
I do not believe in the creed professed by
the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church,
by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know
of. My own mind is my own church.
All national institutions of churches,
whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human
inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and
profit.
I do not mean by this declaration to condemn
those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have
to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally
faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in
disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.
It is impossible to calculate the moral
mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society.
When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to
subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has
prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade
of a priest for the sake of gain, and, in order to qualify himself for that
trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to
morality than this?
Soon after I had published the pamphlet
COMMON SENSE, in
EVERY national church or religion has established
itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain
individuals. The Jews have their Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ,
their apostles and saints; and the Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God
was not open to every man alike.
Each of those churches shows certain books,
which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of
God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word
of God came by divine inspiration; and the Turks say,
that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel from heaven. Each of
those churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I
disbelieve them all.
As it is necessary to affix right ideas to
words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some
observations on the word ‘revelation.’ Revelation when applied to religion,
means something communicated immediately from God to man.
No one will deny or dispute the power of the
Almighty to make such a communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the
sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not
revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he
tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so
on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the
first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not
obliged to believe it.
It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to
call anything a revelation that comes to us at second hand, either verbally or
in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication. After
this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a
revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it,
it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner, for it was not a
revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When Moses told the children of Israel that
he received the two tables of the commandments from the hand of God, they were
not obliged to believe him, because they had no other authority for it than his
telling them so; and I have no other authority for it than some historian
telling me so, the commandments carrying no internal evidence of divinity with
them. They contain some good moral precepts such as any man qualified to be a
lawgiver or a legislator could produce himself, without having recourse to
supernatural intervention. [NOTE: It is, however, necessary to except the
declamation which says that God ‘visits the sins of the fathers upon the
children’. This is contrary to every principle of moral justice.--Author.]
When I am told that the Koran was written in
Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes to near the same
kind of hearsay evidence and second hand authority as the former. I did not see
the angel myself, and therefore I have a right not to believe it.
When also I am told that a woman, called the
Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any
cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an
angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance
required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not
even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is
only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do
not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
It is, however, not difficult to account for
the credit that was given to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He
was born when the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the
world, and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a
story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology
were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not a new thing at
that time to believe a man to have been celestially begotten; the intercourse
of gods with women was then a matter of familiar opinion. Their Jupiter,
according to their accounts, had cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore
had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or obscene;
it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the people called
Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no
more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the
story.
It is curious to observe how the theory of
what is called the Christian Church, sprung out of the tail of the heathen
mythology. A direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making
the reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that then
followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about
twenty or thirty thousand. The statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of
Ephesus. The deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints. The
Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for
everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been
with the other; and