Sensible and Obvious Truths
It is not sufficient to have discovered the disease if we do not apply a remedy. It would be better to leave the sick man in ignorance. Error can only be cured by Truth, and since Moses, Jesus and Mahomet were what we have represented them, we should not seek in their writings for the veritable idea of the Divinity. The apparitions and the divine conformation of the former and the latter, and the divine filiation of the second, are sufficient to convince us that all is but imposture.
God is either a natural being or one of infinite extent who resembles what he contains–material without being. Either way he is neither just nor merciful, nor jealous, nor a God in any way as may be imagined, and as a consequence is neither a punisher nor a remunerator. This idea of punishment and recompense only exists in the minds of the ignorant who only conceive that simple being called God, under images which by no means represent him.
Those who use their understanding without confounding its operations with those of the imagination, and who are powerful enough to abandon the prejudice of a limited education, are the only ones who have sound, clear and distinct ideas. They consider him as the source of all beings which are produced without distinction: one being no more than another in His regard, and man no more difficult to produce than a worm or a flower.
That is why no one should believe that this natural and infinite being, which is commonly called God, esteems man more than an ant, or a lion more than a stone, or who has any regard for beauty or ugliness, for good or bad, for the perfect or imperfect. Or that he desires to be praised, prayed, sought for or caressed, or that he cares what men are, or say, whether susceptible of love or hate, or in a word that he thinks more of man than of any other creatures of whatever nature they be. All these distinctions are only the invention of a narrow mind. Ignorance has created them and interest keeps them alive.
No good sensible man can be convinced of hell, a soul, spirits or devils, in the manner of which they are commonly spoken. All these great senseless words have only been contrived to delude or intimidate the people. Let those then who wish to know the truth read what follows, with a liberal spirit and an intention to only give their judgement with deliberation.
The myriads of stars that we see above us are allowed to be so many solid bodies which move, and among which there is not one designed as the Court Divine where God is like a King in the midst of his courtiers. None is the abode of the blest, nor where all good souls fly after leaving this body and world.
What is called Heaven is nothing but the continuation of our atmosphere, more subtle and more refined, where the stars move without being sustained by any solid mass more than the Earth on which we live, and which like the stars is suspended in the midst of space.
As may be imagined, a Heaven intended for the eternal abode of the happy and of God, was the same among the pagans. Gods and goddesses were also represented in the same way, and so too a Hell or a subterranean place where it was pretended that the wicked souls descended to be tormented.
But this word hell taken in its proper and natural signification means nothing but a lower place, which poets have invented to oppose the dwelling of the celestial inhabitants, who are said to be very sublime and exalted. That is what the Latin word Infernus or inferni signifies, and also the Greek word Hades. It is an obscure place like the sepulchre, or any other low and hidden place.
All the rest of what has been said is only pure fiction and the invention of poets whose symbolical discourses are taken literally by feeble, timid and melancholy minds, as well as by those who are interested in sustaining this opinion.