Tolerance and freedom of thought are the veritable antidotes to religious fanaticism.
Interpretation
Tolerance and open-mindedness are essential to countering extreme religious beliefs.
In this quote, Baron D'Holbach emphasizes the importance of accepting diverse viewpoints and practicing freedom of thought as critical tools in combating the dangers of religious fanaticism. By fostering an environment where different ideas can coexist, society can mitigate the harmful effects that arise from rigid and intolerant belief systems.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about promoting interfaith dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing.
Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.
To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object.
If the whole earth is infinitely small in comparison with the sphere of the stars, what is man compared with all these created beings!
How can one, who eats the flesh of others to swell his flesh, show compassion?
She asked where he lived. Second to the right,' said Peter, 'and then straight on till morning.
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