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.

The unhappiness of people is due to their ignorance of nature.

Nature, you say, is totally inexplicable without a God. That is to say, to explain what you understand very little, you have need of a cause which you understand not at all.

If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.

If the ministers of the Church have often permitted nations to revolt for Heaven's cause, they never allowed them to revolt against real evils or known violencess. It is from Heaven that the chains have come to fetter the minds of mortals.

The atheist . . . destroys the chimeras which afflict the human race, and so leads men back to nature, to experience and to reason.

What, indeed, is an atheist? He is one who destroys delusions which are harmful to humanity in order to lead men back to nature, to reality, to reason. He is a thinker who, having reflected on the nature of matter, its energy, properties and ways of acting, has no need of idealized powers or imaginary intelligences to explain the phenomena of the universe and the operations of nature.