Christianity Unveiled Being An Examination of The Principles And Effects of The Christian Religion

by Paul-Henri Thiry

A God who delights in the tears of his unhappy creatures, who sets for them the ambush, and then punishes them for having fallen into it? A God who himself ordains robbery, persecution, and carnage?

This nation of robbers, usurpers, and murderers, at length established themselves in a country, not indeed very fertile, but which they found delicious in comparison with the desert in which they had so long wandered.

A poor Jew, who pretended to be descended from the royal house of David,1 after being long unknown in his own country, emerges from obscurity, and goes forth to make proselytes. He succeeded amongst some of the most ignorant part of the populace.

Paul, the most ambitious and enthusiastic of the apostles, carried his doctrines, seasoned with the sublime and marvellous, among the people of Greece and Asia, and even the inhabitants of Rome. He gained proselytes, as every man who addresses himself to the imagination of ignorant people may do; and he may be justly styled the principal founder of a religion, which, without him, could never have spread far; for the rest of its followers were ignorant men, from whom he soon separated himself to become the leader of his own sect.2

1 Origen says, that Celsus reproached Christ with having borrowed many of his maxims from Plato. See Origen contra Cel. chap. i. 6. Augustin confesses, that he found the

beginning of the Gospel of John, in Plato. See S. Aug. Conf. I. vii. ch. 9, 10, 11. The notion of the word is evidently taken from Plato; the church has since found means of transplanting a...

Love the Lord thy God with all thy strength, and thy neighbour as thyself. This, according to the God and Legislator of the Christians, is the sum of their duties. Yet we see it is impossible for Christians to love that severe and capricious God whom they worship. On the other hand, we see them eternally busied in tormenting, persecuting, and destroying their neighbours and brethren.

The Christians in adopting the terrible God of the Jews, have sublimed his cruelty. They represent him as the most capricious, wicked, and cruel tyrant which the human mind can conceive, and suppose him to treat his subjects with a barbarity and injustice truly worthy of a demon.

God, by an inconceivable act of his omnipotence, created the universe out of nothing.1 He made the earth for the residence of man, whom he created in his own image. Scarcely had this man, the prime object of the labours of his God, seen the light, when his Creator set a snare for him, into which he undoubtedly knew that he must fall. A serpent, who speaks, seduces a woman, who is not at all surprised at the phenomenon.

God repents having peopled the earth, and he finds it easier to drown and destroy the human race, than to change their hearts.

A good Christian, on his death-bed said, "he had never been able to conceive how a good God could put an innocent God to death,

to appease a just God."