Articles de cette rubrique

• XXV.1 On religious sentiment

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  The pious man and the atheist are always talking about religion : the one talks about what he loves, and the other about what he fears.

• XXV.2 On the motive of attachment for various religions

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  The world’s various religions do not give to those who profess them equal motives for attachment to them ; it depends greatly on the manner in which they mesh with men’s way of thinking and feeling.
  We are extremely prone to idolatry, and yet we are not strongly attached to idolatrous (…)

• XXV.3 On temples

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  Almost all organized peoples live in houses. From this came naturally the idea of building a house for God where they can worship him and go to seek him in their fears or expectations.
  Indeed nothing is more consoling to men than a place where they find the deity more present, and where all (…)

• XXV.4 On ministers of religion

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  The first men, says Porphyry, sacrificed only plants. For such a simple ritual, each man could be a pontiff in his family.
  The natural desire to please the deity multiplied ceremonies, because of which the men, occupied with agriculture, became incapable of performing them all and fulfilling (…)

• XXV.5 On the limits which the laws must set on the wealth of the clergy

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  Individual families may perish, thus assets in them have no perpetual destination. The clergy is a family which cannot perish ; its assets are therefore attached to it forever, and cannot be estranged.
  Individual families can grow, thus their assets must be able to grow as well. The clergy is (…)

• XXV.6 On monasteries

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  The least bit of good sense makes it clear that these bodies that are forever self-perpetuating should not sell their holdings for their lifetime, nor borrow for their lifetime, unless we want them to become the heirs of everyone who has no relatives and of everyone who does not want to have any (…)

• XXV.7 On the luxury of superstition

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  “They are impious toward the gods,” says Plato, “who deny their existence, or who grant it but maintain that they do not meddle in things here below, or finally who think they are easily appeased by sacrifices : three equally pernicious opinions.” There Plato says the most sensible things that (…)

• XXV.8 On the pontificate

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  When religion has many ministers, it is natural that they should have a head, and that the pontificate be established. In the monarchy, where the orders of the state cannot be too separate, and where all forms of authority ought not to be lodged in the same person, it is a good thing for the (…)

• XXV.9 On toleration in point of religion

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  We are being political and not theological here, and even for theologians there is a big difference between tolerating a religion and approving of it.
  When the laws of a state have thought it best to allow multiple religions, they must also oblige them to tolerate each other. It is a principle (…)

• XXV.10 Continuation of the same subject

  7 septembre 2018, par Stewart

  As virtually all religions which zealously strive to establish themselves elsewhere are intolerant, because a religion that can tolerate others is hardly preoccupied by its own propagation, it will be a very good civil law, when the state is satisfied with the religion already established, not (…)