Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (54 page)

Historians know that the Catholic authorities found the memoir and immediately read it because Meslier was buried in an unknown location with no marker and no mention in the parish register. He just disappeared without a trace — except for his book.

Even worse than the treatment of Meslier’s body was the treatment his book received at the hands of Voltaire 30 years later. Eager to promote his own Deism (refer to
Chapter 2
), Voltaire published an abridged version of the memoir, omitting all references to Meslier’s atheism so he too would appear to have been a Deist who revolted against Catholicism. Voltaire even created a completely fictional statement by Meslier, saying he “begged God” to restore the “natural religion” that Christianity had drifted away from. (We know it’s fictional because it doesn’t appear in the original manuscripts — only in Voltaire’s mash-up.)

Despite that dishonesty, Voltaire is the one to thank for bringing Meslier’s memoir to the attention of the thinkers and doers of the Enlightenment — even if he played dress-up with it first.

Promoting Good Sense with d’Holbach

Paris was Mecca for the Enlightenment philosophers in the late 1700s — though I don’t think they’d be too thrilled by
that
analogy. It was the place to be if you were a thinker looking to change European culture, a place where ideas were currency and progress was in the air. And no one stood nearer the vortex of these powerful new ideas than Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789). D’Holbach created a
salon
in Paris, a place for great thinkers to discuss and debate the ideas that ended up driving the engine of the Enlightenment.

Like many in his circle, d’Holbach saw religion not only as false but also as an obstacle to morality. In 1761 he published
Christianity Unveiled,
the first of his many broadsides against religion.

But he was just getting started. Seven years later, he published
The System of Nature,
a book that
picked up where Lucretius left off nearly 2,000 years earlier, describing the nature of things in a materialistic universe without gods.

But just as Lucretius and others discovered before him, you can’t describe the natural world until you get the supernatural one out of the way, so the book included powerful and compelling arguments against religious belief, which d’Holbach called the chief sources of ignorance, servitude, and hatred.

After that case was made, d’Holbach presented a very convincing case for morality without God. There are many reasons to act morally, he said. You just need to have good sense and reflect on what is good for you and for those around you. It’s to my advantage to be good, and to my disadvantage to be bad. The world will make my path smooth if I behave well, and it will make my life miserable if I behave badly. Reflection, backed up with real-world consequences, forms the basis for real morality — not the fear of God.

The book touched off excitement from some and an explosion of outrage from others. Among the furious were the Deist Voltaire and the Calvinist Frederick the Great, both of whom wrote scathing replies. This reaction didn’t worry d’Holbach too much because he had taken the wise precaution of publishing both books under a false name. So although many suspected him as the author, they couldn’t convincingly tie the noose around d’Holbach’s neck.

Not many people would have been eager to string d’Holbach up anyway. He had a reputation for incredible kindness and generosity, and everyone with any power in Paris seemed to have experienced it at one time or another. The Calvinist writer/philosopher Rousseau even based a fictional character, a highly moral atheist, on d’Holbach. That was some good press for d’Holbach, and helpful if you’re going to make a career attacking sacred cows.

It was a long book, and pretty dense in spots. As a result, it didn’t really penetrate to the common people, and they were the ones d’Holbach really wanted to reach. So a few years later, he released a shorter, more accessible version — a kind of
System of Nature For Dummies —
and called it
Good Sense, or Natural Ideas Opposed to Supernatural.
It was an instant bestseller, which didn’t help the blood pressure of the higher-ups one bit. The Catholic Church even threatened to cut off financial support to the French crown if the two books weren’t suppressed.

Too late! Once again, a useful genie had been uncorked. Baron d’Holbach’s works ended up having a tremendous impact on the Enlightenment, especially the developing concept of human rights. Enlightenment ideas challenged traditional power structures around the world, and crucial documents including the US Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights are all rooted directly in Enlightenment principles — which in turn were born in works like d’Holbach’s
Good Sense.

Rejecting Christianity with Russell

The English philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) offered some of the clearest, easy-to-understand arguments against religious belief. His essay “Why I Am Not a Christian” has been called one of the most influential works of the 20th century and is on the very short list of great works of atheist thought.

On the surface, the soft-spoken Russell didn’t seem like the kind of person to get in trouble. Yet he spent most of a long life in trouble of various kinds, mostly for standing up for unpopular positions in which he strongly believed. His loud moral opposition to Britain’s involvement in the First World War got him thrown in prison, and there’s no end to the grief he got for his antireligious writings and speeches.

His view of religion is made crystal clear: religion is “a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race,” he said in another essay. Not that it hasn’t made
some
contributions, he admitted — religion had a hand in creating the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to keep track of eclipses so carefully that they could eventually predict them. “These two services I am prepared to acknowledge,” he said, “but I do not know of any others.”

Russell began “Why I Am Not a Christian” by defining a Christian as a person who believes in God and immortality and who thinks Christ was the best and wisest of men.

Then, using the clarity of thought and expression that was his trademark, Russell explained why each of these three beliefs was unsustainable, refuting each of the traditional arguments for God’s existence in turn, then those for immortality.

At last he turned to the moral character of Jesus Christ. After granting a few worthwhile moral teachings, Russell turned to what he called “one very serious defect” in Christ’s moral character — his belief in the existence and acceptability of an everlasting hell.

As Russell often did when his criticisms got close to the bone, he lightened the moment. “You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, ‘Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell.’ That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone.” It’s true that Christ threatened damnation over and over throughout the Gospels, usually not for moral shortcomings but for disbelief or insufficient respect. For this and other reasons — his odd cursing of figs and pigs, for example — Russell found himself unable to consider Christ “the best and wisest of men.”

In the end he returned to religion itself, which he thought was primarily based in fear of the unknown and the desire for protection in times of trouble, adding that science had done a great deal to reduce the unknown and to provide protection from the chaos of the natural world.

“A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage,” he said. “It does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and free intelligence.”

Building a New Vision

Religious criticism is all well and good — but at some point it’s time to start building a new vision, describing what the world looks like after gods are out of the way. These sections look at three works that do exactly that.

Drawing crowds with Robert Ingersoll

The last half of the 19th century was something of a golden age for freethought in the United States and United Kingdom, and a lot of the credit has to go to the public speeches of Robert Green Ingersoll (1833–1899).

Traveling orators were a popular form of educational entertainment in the 19th century. Robert Ingersoll, a former Illinois state politician whose radically progressive religious and political views eventually made him unelectable, was among the most famous of these speechmakers.

The Illinois Republican Party had urged him to run for governor but wanted him to hide his agnosticism. He thought it would be unethical to conceal information from the public and refused. But leaving politics didn’t mean people wouldn’t come out to listen to him speak — and that’s just what they did, by the thousands, hearing Ingersoll on subjects from education to politics to women’s rights to religion. His outspoken and eloquent views on religion earned him his fame and a nickname — “The Great Agnostic.”

A lot of important works in the history of freethought are . . . well, a little dry. That’s what makes Ingersoll’s speeches so huge. They were eloquent. They were moving. They
inspired.
He often spoke without notes for up to two hours at a go, every sentence a beautifully crafted, quotable pearl. His ability to build an argument from the ground up, bringing the audience with him step by step, helped to make religious unbelief a viable position for many who had frankly never thought it could be.

Though his talks had plenty of religious criticism in them, he went beyond that, sharing a vision of what the world looked like to a person without religious beliefs. In a speech titled “Why I Am an Agnostic,” his description of the feeling that came over him when at last he walked away from religious belief ran counter to the common assumption of the faithful but echoed the actual experience of many, many others:

When I became convinced that the Universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world — not even in infinite space. I was free — free to think, to express my thoughts — free to live to my own ideal — free to live for myself and those I loved — free to use all my faculties, all my senses — free to spread imagination’s wings — free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope . . . I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds . . . We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our years with sunshine — with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the last drop the golden cup of joy.

See what I mean? It was a kind of epic poetry, and it captivated his audiences like nothing else could. No one did more to ignite and fan the flames of this “golden age” of freethought than The Great Agnostic. His influence was brought forward beyond his immediate audience when shortly after his death in 1899, his brother-in-law collected Ingersoll’s best-known speeches for publication as
The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll.