Superstition in all agesHolbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Religion
Superstition in all ages
Holbach, Paul Henri Thiry, baron d'
Atheism
As our Christ-worshipers limit the power of God the Father to begetting
but one Son, why do they not desire that this Second person, and the
Third, should have the same power to beget a Son like themselves? If
this power to beget a son is perfection in the First person, it is,
then, a perfection and a power which does not exist in the Second and in
the Third person. Thus these two Persons, lacking a perfection and a
power which is found in the First one, they are consequently not equal
with Him. If, on the contrary, they say that this power to beget a son
is no perfection, they should not attribute it, then, to the First
person any more than to the other two; for we should attribute
perfections only to an absolutely perfect being. Besides, they would not
dare to say that the power to beget a Divine person is not a perfection;
and if they claim that this First person could have begotten several
sons and daughters, but that He desired but this only Son, and that the
two other persons did not desire to beget any others, we could ask them,
firstly, from whence they know this, for we do not see in their
pretended Holy Scriptures that any One of these Divine personages
reveals any such assertions; how, then, can our Christ-worshipers know
anything about it? They speak but according to their ideas and to their
hollow imaginations. Secondly, we could not avoid saying, that if these
pretended Divine personages had the power of begetting several children,
and did not wish to make use of it, the consequence would be that this
Divine power was ineffectual. It would be entirely without effect in the
Third person, who did not beget or produce any, and would be almost
without effect in the two others, because they limited it. Then this
power of begetting or producing an unlimited number of children would
remain idle and useless; it would be inconsistent to suppose this of
Divine Personages, One of whom had already produced a Son.
Our Christ-worshipers blame and condemn the Pagans because they
attribute Divinity to mortal men, and worship them as Gods after their
death; they are right in doing this. But these Pagans did only what our
Christ-worshipers still do in attributing Divinity to their Christ;
doing which, they condemn themselves also, because they are in the same
error as these Pagans, in that they worship a man who was mortal, and so
very mortal that He died shamefully upon a cross.
It would be of no use for our Christ-worshipers to say that there was a
great difference between their Jesus Christ and the Pagan Gods, under
the pretense that their Christ was, as they claim, really God and man at
the same time, while the Divinity was incarnated in Him, by means of
which, the Divine nature found itself united personally, as they say,
with human nature; these two natures would have made of Jesus Christ a
true God and a true man; this is what never happened, they claim, in the
Pagan Gods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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