Good Sense

Divines never fail to persuade us, that the enormous distance which separates God and man, necessarily renders the conduct of God a mystery to us, and that we have no right to i...

Men are imaginary invalids, whose weakness empirics are interested to encourage, in order to have sale for their drugs. They listen rather to the physician, who prescribes a var...

Priests have the art of drawing from the persecutions themselves, a convincing proof in favour of the religion of the persecuted. But a religion, which boasts of having cost the...

For want of having studied or known the true principles of administration, the objects and rights of social life, the real interests of men and their reciprocal duties, princes,...

The world, it will be said, has all the perfection, of which it is susceptible: since it is not God who made it, it must have great qualities and great defects. But we answer, t...

Pascal says, "that man never does evil so fully and cheerfully, as when he acts from a false principle of conscience." Nothing is more dangerous than a religion, which lets loos...

You blush for your fellow-citizens, who allow themselves to be persuaded, that the God of the universe could change himself into a man, and die upon a cross in a corner of Asia....

"_Atheism_ leaves men to Sense, to Philosophy, to Laws, to Reputation, all which may be guides to moral Virtue, tho' Religion were not: but Superstition dismounts all these, and...

Man dies, and the human body after death is no longer anything but a mass incapable of producing those motions, of which the sum total constituted life. We see, that it has no l...

The ministers of heaven have always known how to profit by the calamities of others. Public misery is their element. They have every where become administrators of the property...

_God_, say you, _chastises only for our good_. But what real good can result to a people from being exterminated by the plague, ravaged by wars, corrupted by the examples of per...

Why, O theologians! do you presume to inquire into the impenetrable mysteries of a being, whom you consider inconceivable to the human mind? You are the blasphemers, when you im...

Every man, who reasons, soon becomes an unbeliever; for reason shows, that theology is nothing but a tissue of chimeras; that religion is contrary to every principle of good sen...

"What?" you will say, "is intelligent man, is the universe, and all it contains, the effect of _chance_?" No; I repeat it, _the universe is not an effect_; it is the cause of al...

Are the metaphysical reasonings and religious disputes, which have so long engrossed the time and attention of so many profound thinkers, better adapted to the generality of men...