ideologyhunter
Contributor
When Father Jean Meslier, the village priest in Etrepigny, France, died in 1729, his parishioners were soon in a state of consternation over an unimaginable scandal. Three (some say four) copies of a massive, handwritten manuscript were found in Father Meslier's house. The manuscript (in English translation since 2009, under the title Testament: Memoir of the Thoughts and Sentiments of Jean Meslier) was a full-barrel assault on Christianity and birthright monarchy. Meslier was an atheist, and apparently became one early in his vocation. Realizing that exposure could bring arrest, torture, and execution, he kept on as a cleric and constructed his atheistic, anti-government arguments in secrecy.
I first read about Meslier in the Oct./Nov. 2023 issue of Free Inquiry. I've spent the last week reading Testament. It consists of 97 chapters, some as short as a page, others running to 20+ pages. It has been called the very first text which was devoted entirely to proving an atheist position. Meslier makes many claims in his text which are the common stock of today's atheist writers. He did it by knowing his Bible thoroughly and by amassing as comprehensive a freethought library as was possible in the late 17th/early 18th centuries. Among his claims:
> Religion is a means of controlling people ("those who govern you establish with force and power a detestable mystery of iniquity over you and your fellow men...Religion and politics are united in cooperation to hold you always captive under their tyrranical laws.")
> Religion is a mix of fable, myth, and specious argument which man can dispel with the use of reason and logic
> Religion is a reflection of man's credulity, but its spell can be dispersed with the use of the mind
> Throngs of competing faiths point to fantasy and imagination as the source of religion
> The Bible is afflicted with internal and external contradictions
> The Bible does not show any higher intelligence than "the natural and ordinary forces of the human mind"
> The futility of prayer is shown in the specious reasoning used by theists to explain its results or lack of results
> The notion of an afterlife is an illusion with no proof behind it
> The idea of an eternal soul is absurd
> The Trinity is absurd
> The notion that an omnipotent god could be injured or offended by sin is absurd
> The notion that an omnipotent god could be pleased or pacified by animal sacrifice is absurd and demeaning
> That such a god could concern himself with circumcision is absurd
> That a god could have a gender is absurd
> The notion of a merciful and loving god creating a hell for most of mankind is absurd and repellent
> Communion and transubstantiation are absurd
> To cite one of Meslier's specific critiques of scripture, he notes that the church teaches that Christ came to save all men, yet Mark's gospel has him telling the disciples that he teaches in parables so that the uninitiated 'may look and yet not see, listen yet not understand, for if they did, they would turn to God, and he would forgive them'.
I read Meslier in the Prometheus edition -- in past centuries, spurious editions of Meslier have been issued, some with the writings of other iconoclast authors substituted for the real thing. The book runs to 593 pages, and I read it with some fascination, realizing that he wrote the work in secret, probably at night, toiling years over a work he knew would not be seen until after his death. He uses sarcasm and invective freely, calling his nominal co-religionists the god-cultists or Christ-cultists. Yet in his day job he had to promote the company line and perform the sacraments, which he found to be nonsense.
There are two caveats to reading Meslier today. One that will surely repel many readers is the antisemitism he reveals in almost every depiction he gives of Old Testament events. This was a feature of orthodox Christianity in his day, and he did not analyze it or see past it.
The other is his repetitiveness. I cannot think of another author who restates his case as endlessly as Meslier. Once he seizes on a descriptor for some piece of argument, you can be sure he will use the same phrase over and over until he drives you crazy with it. (The word extension, used to note the range of space and matter, must occur a couple of thousand times in the book.) He covers the First Cause argument and the Ontological Argument at deadly length -- impressive that a village priest 300 years ago could grapple with these arguments, but... too much. Because this was a secret work, with, most probably an audience of one, there was no one to tell him to edit, condense, omit the restatements.
Still, I am glad I read the book. He was a groundbreaker, for all his stylistic (and antisemitic) lapses.
I first read about Meslier in the Oct./Nov. 2023 issue of Free Inquiry. I've spent the last week reading Testament. It consists of 97 chapters, some as short as a page, others running to 20+ pages. It has been called the very first text which was devoted entirely to proving an atheist position. Meslier makes many claims in his text which are the common stock of today's atheist writers. He did it by knowing his Bible thoroughly and by amassing as comprehensive a freethought library as was possible in the late 17th/early 18th centuries. Among his claims:
> Religion is a means of controlling people ("those who govern you establish with force and power a detestable mystery of iniquity over you and your fellow men...Religion and politics are united in cooperation to hold you always captive under their tyrranical laws.")
> Religion is a mix of fable, myth, and specious argument which man can dispel with the use of reason and logic
> Religion is a reflection of man's credulity, but its spell can be dispersed with the use of the mind
> Throngs of competing faiths point to fantasy and imagination as the source of religion
> The Bible is afflicted with internal and external contradictions
> The Bible does not show any higher intelligence than "the natural and ordinary forces of the human mind"
> The futility of prayer is shown in the specious reasoning used by theists to explain its results or lack of results
> The notion of an afterlife is an illusion with no proof behind it
> The idea of an eternal soul is absurd
> The Trinity is absurd
> The notion that an omnipotent god could be injured or offended by sin is absurd
> The notion that an omnipotent god could be pleased or pacified by animal sacrifice is absurd and demeaning
> That such a god could concern himself with circumcision is absurd
> That a god could have a gender is absurd
> The notion of a merciful and loving god creating a hell for most of mankind is absurd and repellent
> Communion and transubstantiation are absurd
> To cite one of Meslier's specific critiques of scripture, he notes that the church teaches that Christ came to save all men, yet Mark's gospel has him telling the disciples that he teaches in parables so that the uninitiated 'may look and yet not see, listen yet not understand, for if they did, they would turn to God, and he would forgive them'.
I read Meslier in the Prometheus edition -- in past centuries, spurious editions of Meslier have been issued, some with the writings of other iconoclast authors substituted for the real thing. The book runs to 593 pages, and I read it with some fascination, realizing that he wrote the work in secret, probably at night, toiling years over a work he knew would not be seen until after his death. He uses sarcasm and invective freely, calling his nominal co-religionists the god-cultists or Christ-cultists. Yet in his day job he had to promote the company line and perform the sacraments, which he found to be nonsense.
There are two caveats to reading Meslier today. One that will surely repel many readers is the antisemitism he reveals in almost every depiction he gives of Old Testament events. This was a feature of orthodox Christianity in his day, and he did not analyze it or see past it.
The other is his repetitiveness. I cannot think of another author who restates his case as endlessly as Meslier. Once he seizes on a descriptor for some piece of argument, you can be sure he will use the same phrase over and over until he drives you crazy with it. (The word extension, used to note the range of space and matter, must occur a couple of thousand times in the book.) He covers the First Cause argument and the Ontological Argument at deadly length -- impressive that a village priest 300 years ago could grapple with these arguments, but... too much. Because this was a secret work, with, most probably an audience of one, there was no one to tell him to edit, condense, omit the restatements.
Still, I am glad I read the book. He was a groundbreaker, for all his stylistic (and antisemitic) lapses.
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