Letters To Eugenia; Or, A Preservative Against Religious PrejudicesHolbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Religion
Letters To Eugenia; Or, A Preservative Against Religious Prejudices
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Christianity -- Controversial literature
It is assuredly sufficient to expose such opinions to demonstrate their
absurdity. It is evident, if there exists only a single God, there
cannot be three. We may, it is true, contemplate the Deity after the
manner of Plato, who, before the birth of Christianity, exhibited him
under three different points of view, that is to say, as all-wise, as
all-powerful, as full of reason, and as infinite in goodness; but it was
verily the excess of delirium to personify these three divine qualities,
or transform them into real beings. We can readily imagine these moral
attributes to be united in the same God, but it is egregious folly
to fashion them into three different Gods; nor will it remedy this
metaphysical polytheism to assert that these three are one. Besides,
this revery never entered the head of the Hebrew legislator. The
Eternal, in revealing himself to Moses, did not announce himself as
triple. There is not one syllable in the Old Testament about this
Trinity, although a notion so _bizarre_, so marvellous, and so little
consonant with our ideas of a divine being, deserved to have been
formally announced, especially as it is the foundation and corner stone
of the Christian religion, which was from all eternity an object of the
divine solicitude, and on the establishment of which, if we may credit
our sapient priests, God seems to have entertained serious thoughts long
before, the creation of the world.
Nevertheless, the second person, or the second God of the Trinity, is
revealed in flesh; the Son of God is made man. But how could the pure
Spirit who presides over the universe beget a son? How could this son,
who before his incarnation was only a pure spirit, combine that ethereal
essence with a material body, and envelop himself with it? How could the
divine nature amalgamate itself with the imperfect nature of man, and
how could an immense and infinite being, as the Deity is represented,
be formed in the womb of a virgin? After what manner could a pure spirit
fecundate this favorite virgin? Did the Son of God enjoy in the womb of
his mother the faculties of omnipotence, or was he like other children
during his infancy,--weak, liable to infirmities, sickness, and
intellectual imbecility, so conspicuous in the years of childhood; and
if so, what, during this period, became of the divine wisdom and power?
In fine, how could God suffer and die? How could a just God consent that
a God exempt from all sin should endure the chastisements which are due
to sinners? Why did he not appease himself without immolating a victim
so precious and so innocent? What would you think of that sovereign who,
in the event of his subjects rebelling against him, should forgive
them all, or a select number of them, by putting to death his only and
beloved son, who had not rebelled?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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