If we go back to the beginnings of things, we shall always find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that imagination, rapture and deception embellished them; that weakness worships them; that custom spares them; and that tyranny favors them in order to profit from the blindness of men.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that human emotions and weaknesses have historically led to the creation and worship of deities.
Baron D'Holbach's quote reflects on the origins of religious beliefs, arguing that they stem from fundamental human emotions such as ignorance and fear. He posits that these emotions give birth to gods, while imagination and deception enhance their appeal, with societal customs and tyrannical powers maintaining their existence for personal gain, thus exploiting the blind faith of the masses.
In practice
In a discussion about the psychological origins of religion, one might use this quote to emphasize how fear influences belief.
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind matter... than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.
Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.
To discover the true principles of Morality, men have no need of theology, of revelation, or of gods: They have need only of common sense.
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
The normal is what you find but rarely. The normal is an ideal. It is a picture that one fabricates of the average characteristics of men, and to find them all in a single man is hardly to be expected.
Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´
If no one remembers a misdeed or names it publically, it remains invisible. To the observer, its victim is not a victim and its perpetrator is not a perpetrator; both are misperceived because the suffering of the one and the violence of the other go unseen. A double injustice occurs-the first when the original deed is done and the second when it disappears.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The waters are in motion, but the moon retains its serenity.
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