ATHEISM 🙝
"It has been very well said, that if triangles were to make to themselves gods, they would give them three sides. My dear Usbek, when I behold men, mere crawlers on this atom, the earth, which is but a point in the universe, proposing themselves as exact models for Providence, I know not how to harmonise such extravagance with such littleness."
--Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, "Persian Letters", 1714, transl. John Davidson
❧ This entry is titled Atheism, and will be a good place for quotations on the subject of unbelief. It will also be a good place to mention that that paradox has not been traced to any extant Epicurean text.
Locke, John; Letter Concerning Toleration; 1689: "Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration." Edited (transl. from Latin?) Mario Montuori
Montaigne, Michel de; Apology for Raymond Sebond: 1588: "Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience." Transl. Charles Cotton
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