mbats
religion and its phantasies by the arms of reason, is like a man who
uses a sword to kill flies: as soon as the blow is struck, the flies and
the fancies return to the minds from which we thought to have banished
them.

As soon as we refuse the proofs which theology pretends to give of the
existence of a God, they oppose to the arguments which destroy them, an
innate conviction, a profound persuasion, an invincible inclination
inherent in every man, which brings to him, in spite of himself, the
idea of an Almighty being which he can not altogether expel from his
mind, and which he is compelled to recognize in spite of the strongest
reasons that we can give him. But if we wish to analyze this innate
conviction, upon which so much weight is placed, we will find that it is
but the effect of a rooted habit, which, making them close their eyes
against the most demonstrative proofs, leads the majority of men, and
often the most enlightened ones, back to the prejudices of childhood.
What can this innate sense or this ill-founded persuasion prove against
the evidence which shows us that what implies contradiction can not
exist?

We are told, very gravely, that it is not demonstrated that God does not
exist. However, nothing is better demonstrated, notwithstanding all that
men have told us so far, than that this God is an idle fancy, whose
existence is totally impossible, as nothing is more evident or more
clearly demonstrated than that a being can not combine qualities so
dissimilar, so contradictory, so irreconcilable as those which all the
religions of the earth ascribe to Divinity. The theologian's God, as
well as the God of the theist, is He not evidently a cause incompatible
with the effects attributed to Him? In whatever light we may look upon
it, we must either invent another God, or conclude that the one which,
for so many centuries, has been revealed to mortals, is at the same time
very good and very wicked, very powerful and very weak, immutable and
changeable, perfectly intelligent and perfectly destitute of reason, of
plan, and of means; the friend of order and permitting disorder; very
just and very unjust; very skillful and very awkward. Finally, are we
not obliged to admit that it is impossible to reconcile the discordant
attributes which are heaped upon a being of whom we can not say a single
word without falling into the most palpable contradictions? Let us
attempt to attribute but a single quality to D