Voltaire

Voltaire — born François-Marie Arouet — was the eighteenth century's most famous man: playwright, historian, pamphleteer, twice a prisoner in the Bastille, exile in England, millionaire by speculation, and for his last quarter-century the "patriarch of Ferney," running a one-man human-rights bureau from an estate straddling the French-Swiss border.

He is remembered as religion's scourge; the truth is sharper. Voltaire was a deist, not an atheist. The order of nature convinced him of a divine intelligence — "the universe embarrasses me," he wrote in verse, "and I cannot dream that this clock exists and has no clockmaker" — and he argued against the atheism of d'Holbach's circle. What he warred on was l'infâme — the infamy — his name for persecuting, dogmatic, miracle-mongering institutional religion. "Écrasez l'infâme" signed hundreds of his letters.

The Philosophical Dictionary (1764) and Candide (1759) carry the two blades. Candide — written after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed tens of thousands on All Saints' Day — destroys Leibnizian optimism ("all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds") by marching its innocent hero through war, Inquisition, and shipwreck; it remains the most readable treatment of the problem of evil ever written. The Dictionary's articles — "Faith," "Fanaticism," "Miracles," "Theist" — perfected the weaponized encyclopedia entry.

His finest hours were casework: the campaign that posthumously exonerated Jean Calas, a Protestant broken on the wheel in Toulouse on a fabricated charge, argued in the Treatise on Toleration (1763). He died in Paris in 1778, denied Christian burial and smuggled into consecrated ground anyway — a final Voltairean joke. Every argument that separates God from the crimes of God's ministries owes him its tone.