Voltaire on Atheism

“If there are atheists, whom must one blame if not the mercenary tyrants of souls, who, making us revolt against their knaveries, force a few weak minds to deny the God whom these monsters dishonour?”

“What conclusion shall we draw from all this? That atheism is a very pernicious monster in those who govern; that it is also pernicious in the persons around statesmen ...; that, if it is not so deadly as fanaticism, it is nearly always fatal to virtue.”

“The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars who reason badly, and who, not being able to understand the creation, the origin of evil and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypotheses of the eternity of things and of inevitability.”

“For entirely savage races,... one cannot count them among either the atheists or the theists. Asking them their belief would be like asking them if they are for Aristotle or Democritus: they know nothing; they are not atheists any more than they are Peripatetics.”

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. What is most repellent in [Holbach's] The System of Nature — after the recipe for making eels from flour — is the audacity with which it decides that there is no God, without even having tried to prove the impossibility. There is some eloquence in the book: but much more rant, and no sort of proof.”

“I would not wish to have to deal with an atheist prince, who would find it in his interest to have me ground to powder in a mortar: I should be quite certain of being ground to powder. If I were a sovereign, I would not wish to have to deal with atheist courtiers, whose interest it would be to poison me: I should have to be taking antidotes every day. It is therefore absolutely necessary for princes and for peoples, that the idea of a Supreme Being, creator, ruler, rewarder, revenger, shall be deeply engraved in people's minds.”

“The Caffres, the Hottentots, the Topinambous, and many other small nations, have no God: they neither deny nor affirm; they have never heard speak of Him; tell them that there is a God: they will believe it easily; tell them that everything happens through the nature of things: they will believe you equally. To claim that they are atheists is to make the same imputation as if one said they are anti-Cartesian; they are neither for nor against Descartes. They are real children; a child is neither atheist nor deist, he is nothing.”

“Men fattened on our substance cry to us: "Be persuaded that a she-ass has spoken (Balaam's ass); believe that a fish has swallowed a man and has given him up at the end of three days safe and sound on the shore (Jonah); have no doubt that the God of the universe ordered one Jewish prophet to eat excrement (Ezekiel), and another prophet to buy two whores and to make with them sons of whoredom (Hosea)." These are the very words that the God of truth and purity has been made to utter.... These inconceivable absurdities revolt weak and rash minds, as well as wise and resolute minds. They say: "Our masters paint God to us as the most insensate and the most barbarous of all beings; therefore there is no God;" but they should say: "Our masters attribute to God their absurdities and their furies; therefore God is the contrary of what they proclaim, therefore God is as wise and good as they make him out mad and wicked." It is thus that wise men account for things.”