Summary Testament
Jean Meillier
Testament
In the preface the author reports that during his lifetime he could not openly express his thoughts on the ways of managing people and their religions, since this would entail very dangerous and deplorable consequences. The purpose of this work is to expose those ridiculous errors, among which all had the misfortune to be born and live – the author himself had to support them. This unpleasant duty did not give him any pleasure – as his friends could see, he performed it with great disgust and rather carelessly.
From a young age, the author saw errors and abuses, from which all evil in the world goes, and over the years became even more convinced of blindness and anger of people, in the senselessness of their superstitions, in the injustice of their mode of government. Having penetrated into the secrets of the cunning policy of ambitious people striving for power and honor, the author easily guessed the source and origin of superstition
Every cult and worship of the gods is a delusion, abuse, illusion, deception and quackery. All decrees and decrees issued by the name and authority
The first proof is based on the fact that all religions are man’s fabrication. It is impossible to admit their divine origin, for they all contradict each other and condemn each other. Consequently, these different religions can not be true and stem from the supposedly divine principle of truth. That is why the Roman Catholic adherents of Christ are convinced that there is only one true religion – their own. They consider the following to be the basic position of their teaching and their faith: there is only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one church, namely the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church, outside of which, they claim, there is no salvation. Hence, it can be clearly deduced that all other religions were created by man. It is said that the first invented these imaginary gods is a certain Nin, the son of the first king Assyrians, and it happened about the time of the birth of Isaac or, according to the chronology of the Jews, in 2001 from the creation of the world. It is said that after the death of his father, Nin set him an idol (who was shortly after that the name of Jupiter), and demanded that everyone worship this idol as a god – in this way all sorts of idolatries spread, then spread on the earth.
The second argument proceeds from the premise that blind faith lies at the basis of all religions – a source of delusion, illusion and deception. None of the Christian worshipers can prove with the help of clear, reliable and convincing arguments that his religion is truly a god-established religion. That is why they have been arguing with each other for many centuries on this issue, and even pursue each other with fire and sword, defending every one of their beliefs. The exposure of the false Christian religion will at the same time be a verdict and all other absurd religions. True Christians believe that faith is the beginning and the basis of salvation. However, this insane faith is always blind and is a pernicious source of trouble and eternal schism among people. Everyone stands for his religion and its sacred secrets not for reasons of reason, but because of persistence – there is no such brutality, which people would not have resorted to under the beautiful and plausible pretext of protecting the imaginary truth of their religion. But one can not believe that the omnipotent, all-wise and wise God whom christians themselves call the god of love, peace, mercy, consolation, etc., wished to found a religion on such a fateful and pernicious source of confusion and eternal strife – a blind belief in a thousand and thousand times more harmful, than the golden apple thrown by the goddess of discord at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, which then became the cause of the death of the city and the kingdom of Troy.
Proof of the third is derived from the falsity of visions and divine revelations. If at the present time a person decided to boast of something similar, he would be considered a half-witted fanatic. Where is the appearance of the deity in these lurid dreams and empty deceptions of the imagination? Imagine an example: several foreigners, for example Germans or Swiss, will come to France and, having seen the most beautiful provinces of the kingdom, announce that God appeared to them in their country, told them to go to France and promised to give them and their descendants all the beautiful lands and patrimony from the Rhone and the Rhine to the ocean, promised them to make an eternal alliance with them and their descendants, bless all the peoples of the earth in them, and, as a sign of their union with them, ordered them to circumcise themselves and all the male babies born to them and their offspring. Will there be a person, who will not laugh at this nonsense and will not find these foreigners crazy? But the stories of supposedly holy patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob deserve no more serious treatment than these aforementioned nonsense. And if three respectable patriarchs told about their visions in our day, they would turn into a general laughingstock. However, these imaginary revelations expose themselves, for they are given only in favor of individuals and one people. One can not believe that a god, supposed to be infinitely good, perfect and just, has committed such an outrageous injustice towards other people and nations. False covenants also expose themselves in three other ways: 1) a vulgar, shameful and ridiculous sign of the alleged union of God with people; 2) the cruel custom of bloody slaughter of innocent animals and the barbarous command of God to Abraham to sacrifice his own son to him; 3) the apparent non-fulfillment of the wonderful and generous promises that God, according to Moses, imposed on the three patriarchs named. For the Jewish people have never been numerous – on the contrary, it was considerably inferior in number to other peoples. And the remnants of this pathetic nation are now considered the most insignificant and despicable people in the world, which do not have anywhere else in their territory and their state. Jews do not even speak the country that they claim is promised and given to them by God for all time. All this clearly proves that the so-called sacred books were not inspired by God. pushed the three named patriarchs. For the Jewish people have never been numerous – on the contrary, it was considerably inferior in number to other peoples. And the remnants of this pathetic nation are now considered the most insignificant and despicable people in the world, which do not have anywhere else in their territory and their state. Jews do not even speak the country that they claim is promised and given to them by God for all time. All this clearly proves that the so-called sacred books were not inspired by God. pushed the three named patriarchs. For the Jewish people have never been numerous – on the contrary, it was considerably inferior in number to other peoples. And the remnants of this pathetic nation are now considered the most insignificant and despicable people in the world, which do not have anywhere else in their territory and their state. Jews do not even speak the country that they claim is promised and given to them by God for all time. All this clearly proves that the so-called sacred books were not inspired by God. promised and given to them by God for all time. All this clearly proves that the so-called sacred books were not inspired by God. promised and given to them by God for all time. All this clearly proves that the so-called sacred books were not inspired by God.
Proof of the fourth follows from the falsity of imaginary promises and prophecies. The Christ-worshipers claim that only God can foresee and predict the future with certainty long before its onset. They also assure that the future was prophesied by the prophets. What were these God’s men who supposedly spoke according to the inspiration of the holy spirit? These were either fanatical hallucinations, or deceivers who pretended to be prophets, to make it easier for the dark and ordinary people to take the nose. There is a real sign for the recognition of false prophets: every prophet, whose predictions do not come true, but, on the contrary, turn out to be false, is not a real prophet. For example, the famous Moses promised and prophesied to his people in the name of God that he would be specially chosen from God, that God will sanctify and bless him above all the peoples of the earth and give him the country of Canaan and neighboring areas in perpetual possession – all these wonderful and tempting promises turned out to be false. The same can be said of the eloquent prophecies of King David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, Zechariah and all the rest. Proof of the fifth: a religion that admits, approves and even resolves in its teachings and morals delusions, can not be a divine institution. Christian religion, and especially its Roman sect, allows, approves and resolves five errors: 1) it teaches that there is only one god, and at the same time obliges to believe that there are three divine persons, each of whom is a true god, and this threefold and the one god has no body, no form, no image whatsoever; 2) she attributes the divinity to Jesus Christ – a mortal man who, even in the depiction of the evangelists and disciples, was but a miserable fanatic, a demoniac seducer and a hapless hanged man; 3) she orders to read as a god and savior miniature idols from dough, which are baked between two iron sheets, consecrated and eaten daily; 4) she proclaims that God created Adam and Eve in a state of bodily and spiritual perfection, but then drove both of them out of paradise and condemned them to all life’s adversities, as well as an eternal curse with all their offspring; 5) Finally, she, under pain of eternal damnation, obliges to believe that God took pity on the people and sent them a savior who voluntarily accepted a shameful death on the cross in order to atone for their sins and shed his blood to give satisfaction to the justice of the god-father,
Proof of the sixth: a religion that tolerates and approves abuses that are contrary to justice and good governance, encouraging even the tyranny of powerful worlds to the detriment of the people, can not be true and truly God-ordained, for divine laws and institutions must be fair and impartial. The Christian religion tolerates and encourages at least five or six such abuses: 1) it sanctifies the huge disparity between the different states and situations of people, when some are born only to despotically rule and enjoy all the pleasures of life, and others are doomed to be beggars, unhappy and despised slaves; 2) it allows the existence of whole categories of people who do not bring real benefits to the world and serve only as a burden to the people – this countless army of bishops, abbots, chaplains and monks make huge riches, taking from the hands of honest workers earned by them in the sweat of their faces; 3) it reconciles with the unjustified appropriation of the private goods of the blessings and riches of the land that all people should have in common and enjoy in the same position; 4) it justifies the unjustified, outrageous and insulting differences between families – as a result, people with a higher position want to use this advantage and imagine that they have a higher price than all the others; 5) she establishes the indissolubility of the marriage until the death of one of the spouses, which results in an endless number of unsuccessful marriages in which husbands feel unhappy martyrs with wicked wives, or wives feel unhappy martyrs with evil husbands; 6) Finally, The Christian religion sanctifies and supports the most terrible delusion that makes most people utterly unhappy for life: it is about the almost universal tyranny of the great worlds. The Sovereigns and their first ministers set as their main rule to lead the peoples to exhaustion, to make them poor and miserable, to lead to greater submission and to take away from them every opportunity to undertake anything against the authorities. The people of France are in a particularly difficult situation, for the last of its kings went beyond all others in asserting their absolute power and brought the subjects to the extreme extreme of poverty. Nobody shed so much blood, was not responsible for killing so many people, did not make widows and orphans shed so many tears, did not ruin and did not devastate so many cities and provinces like the late King Louis XIV,
Proof of the seventh proceeds from the falsity of the very idea of people about the imaginary existence of God. From the positions of modern metaphysics, physics and morality, it is clearly evident that there is no supreme being, therefore people are using the name and authority of God quite wrongly and wrongly to establish and protect the delusions of their religion, as well as to maintain the tyrannical domination of their kings. It is quite clear from where the original belief in the gods originates. In the story of the imaginary creation of the world, it is definitely indicated that the god of Jews and Christians talked, reasoned, walked and walked about the garden, neither to give nor to take as the most ordinary man – it also says that God created Adam in the image and likeness of his own. Therefore, it is very likely that the supposed god was a cunning, who wanted to laugh at the ingenuity and uncouthness of his friend – Adam, apparently, was a rare gang and a fool, so easily succumbed to the persuasion of his wife and the deceitful seduction of the serpent. Unlike the imaginary God, matter exists indisputably, for it is found everywhere, is in everything, everyone can see and feel it. What, then, is the unfathomable mystery of creation? The more you think about the various properties that an alleged higher being has to endow, the more you become entangled in the labyrinth of apparent contradictions. The situation with the system of natural formation of things from matter itself is quite different, therefore it is much easier to recognize it as the very root cause of everything that exists. There is no such force that would create something out of nothing – this means that time, place, space,
Proof of the eighth follows from the falsity of ideas about the immortality of the soul. If the soul, as the Christian worshipers affirm, was purely spiritual, it would have no body, no parts, no form, no appearance, no extension – therefore, it would not be anything real, nothing substantial. However, the soul, animating the body, communicates its strength and motion, therefore it must have a body and a stretch, for the essence of being in this lies. If one asks what becomes of this fluid and subtle matter at the time of death, it can be said without hesitation that it dissipates instantly and dissolves in the air, like light vapor and light exhalation – about the same as the flame of a candle dies of itself after the exhaustion of that combustible material, which it feeds on.
The author considers the ninth and final proof to be the consistency of the previous eight: according to him, not one argument and one reasoning does not destroy or contradict each other; on the contrary, they support and confirm each other. This is a sure sign that all of them rely on the firm and solid foundation of the truth itself, since a delusion on such a question could not be confirmed by the complete agreement of such strong and compelling arguments.
Turning to all the peoples of the earth, the author calls on people to forget the strife, unite and rebel against common enemies – tyranny and superstition. Even in one of the allegedly holy books it is said that God will overthrow the proud princes from the throne and plant the humble in their place. If you deprive the arrogant parasites of the abundant nutritious juice delivered by the labors and efforts of the people, they will dry up, like grass and plants wither, whose roots are deprived of the ability to absorb the earth’s juices. Equally, we need to get rid of empty rituals of false religions. There is only one and only true religion: it is the religion of wisdom and purity of morals, honesty and decency, cordial sincerity and nobility of the soul, determination to finally destroy the tyranny and superstitious cult of the gods, the desire to maintain justice everywhere and protect people’s freedom, conscientious work and well-organized life of all together, mutual love for each other and the indestructible preservation of peace. People will find happiness by following the rules, foundations and commandments of this religion. They will remain miserable and unhappy slaves until they endure the rule of tyrants and abuse from delusions.
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