een
educated differently from yourself? If I am incredulous, is it possible
for me to banish from my mind the reasons which have unsettled my faith?
If God allows men the freedom to damn themselves, is it your business?
Are you wiser and more prudent than this God whose rights you wish to
avenge?

CLVI.--EVERY RELIGION IS INTOLERANT, AND CONSEQUENTLY DESTRUCTIVE OF
BENEFICENCE.

There is no religious person who, according to his temperament, does not
hate, despise, or pity the adherents of a sect different from his own.
The dominant religion (which is never but that of the sovereign and the
armies) always makes its superiority felt in a very cruel and injurious
manner toward the weaker sects. There does not exist yet upon earth a
true tolerance; everywhere a jealous God is worshiped, and each nation
believes itself His friend to the exclusion of all others.

Every nation boasts itself of worshiping the true God, the universal
God, the Sovereign of Nature; but when we come to examine this Monarch
of the world, we perceive that each organization, each sect, each
religious party, makes of this powerful God but an inferior sovereign,
whose cares and kindness extend themselves but over a small number of
His subjects who pretend to have the exclusive advantage of His favors,
and that He does not trouble Himself about the others.

The founders of religions, and the priests who maintain them, have
intended to separate the nations which they indoctrinated, from other
nations; they desired to separate their own flock by distinctive
features; they gave to their votaries Gods inimical to other Gods as
well as the forms of worship, dogmas, ceremonies, separately; they
persuaded them especially that the religions of others were ungodly and
abominable. By this infamous contrivance, these ambitious impostors took
exclusive possession of the minds of their votaries, rendered them
unsocial, and made them consider as outcasts all those who had not the
same ideas and form of worship as their own. This is the way religion
succeeded in closing the heart, and in banishing from it that affection
which man ought to have for his fellow-being. Sociability, tolerance,
humanity, these first virtues of all morality are totally in compatible
with religious prejudices.

CLVII.--ABUSE OF A STATE RELIGION.

Every national religion has a tendency to make man vain, unsocial, and
wicked; the first step toward humanity is to permit each o