All religions, with their
gods, their demigods, and their prophets, their messiahs and
their saints, were created by the credulous fancy of men who had
not attained the full development and full possession of their
faculties.
Consequently, the religious heaven is nothing but a
mirage in which man, exalted by ignorance and faith, discovers
his own image, but enlarged and reversed - that is, divinized.
The history of religion, of the birth, grandeur, and decline of
the gods who have succeeded one another in human belief, is
nothing, therefore, but the development of the collective
intelligence and conscience of mankind. As fast as they
discovered, in the course of their historically progressive
advance, either in themselves or in external nature, a power, a
quality, or even any great defect whatever, they attributed them
to their gods, after having exaggerated and enlarged them beyond
measure, after the manner of children, by an act of their
religious fancy. Thanks to this modesty and pious generosity of
believing and credulous men, heaven has grown rich with the
spoils of the earth, and, by a necessary consequence, the richer
heaven became, the more wretched became humanity and the earth.
God once installed, he was naturally proclaimed the cause,
reason, arbiter and absolute disposer of all things: the world
thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator,
after having unknowingly extracted him from the void, bowed down
before him, worshipped him, and avowed himself his creature and
his slave.
Christianity is precisely
the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and
manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of
every religious system, which is the impoverishment,
enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of
divinity.
God being everything, the
real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice,
goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity,
evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is
the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life
by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine
revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs,
prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and
these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on
earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself
to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise
absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience;
for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and
against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds. Slaves
of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far
as the State is consecrated by the Church. This truth
Christianity, better than all other religions that exist or have
existed, understood, not excepting even the old Oriental
religions, which included only distinct and privileged nations,
while Christianity aspires to embrace entire humanity; and this
truth Roman Catholicism, alone among all the Christian sects, has
proclaimed and realized with rigorous logic. That is why
Christianity is the absolute religion, the final religion; why
the Apostolic and Roman Church is the only consistent,
legitimate, and divine church.
With all due respect, then,
to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers,
politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication
of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of
human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of
mankind, both in theory and practice.
Unless, then, we desire the
enslavement and degradation of mankind, as the Jesuits desire it,
as the mÙmiers, pietists, or Protestant Methodists desire
it, we may not, must not make the slightest concession either to
the God of theology or to the God of metaphysics. He who, in this
mystical alphabet, begins with A will inevitably end with Z; he
who desires to worship God must harbor no childish illusions
about the matter, but bravely renounce his liberty and humanity.
If God is, man is a slave;
now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist.
