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The Religion of Voltaire: He was an atheist, anti-Semite, hated Islam

Compiled by Lewis Loflin

They argue Voltaire was not an atheist, was something called a pantheist. Pantheism is simply atheism and is promoted by many so-called "modern deists" who take a strange religious view of nature. (Or treat it as divine.) Voltaire claimed to be a Deist, he was not. The God of Deism transcends nature, God is not Nature nor is Nature divine. The claim of pandeism is equally absurd. This is merely an atheistic creation of god as an abstract principle and nothing in any real sense. Thus it's atheism. Eastern religion is also a favorite of many atheists today as it was with Voltaire. Many of those of the French Enlightenment attempted to replace Christianity with pagan Greek philosophy. Voltaire was an elitist and hypocrite.

Voltaire has written of "tolerance," but was totally intolerant of Christians and was a rabid anti-Semite. So "tolerance" applied to anything but Christians and Jews. That's pretty much where radical Humanists are at today. The Humanist French Revolution gave us the gelatine and state sanctioned murder. Paul Kurtz of the Humanist Society called Marx "the greatest humanist of the 19th Century." Humanist philosophy later gave us the gulag and gas chambers.
In the New York Times (September 30, 1990) to quote Arthur Herzberg on the question of Voltaire's Anti-Semitism:

...He was at war with both Judaism and Christianity. He wanted to purge all men, of whatever persuasion, from these superstitions in order to make them enlightened. In a book published more than 20 years ago, in 1968, entitled ''The French Enlightenment and the Jews,'' I argued against this construction. An anti-Semite of the most damaging kind is one who asserts that, no matter what Jews might believe, their inherent character is fixed - and nasty. In the book, I cite dozens of passages from the whole corpus of Voltaire to the very end of his life, more than a decade after he had made his brief bow to de Pinto. Two citations will suffice. In his ''Letter of Memmius to Cicero'' (1771), Voltaire, in the pose of an ancient Roman reporting on the Jews, wrote: "They are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair.

I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race." In the next year, writing the essay "One Must Take Sides" - introduced as "the last word by Voltaire on metaphysics" - he ridiculed each of the major religions, but he was meanest to the Jews: "You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables, in bad conduct and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny." This is hardly the rhetoric of a man who thinks that Jews are just another people waiting to be enlightened. It is the talk of a "noble Roman," his favorite self-definition, who has no patience with inferior people such as Jews and, for that matter, blacks.

The defenders of Voltaire have continued to argue that he was not personally an anti-Semite but only guilty of some rhetorical excesses. That is not how those who were arguing for and against the emancipation of the Jews, both in his own time and in the next several generations, read him. Jacobins such as Jean Francois Rewbell in the 1790's and the socialist Pierre Proudhon in the next generation are among the many figures, especially of the left, who justified their arguments against the Jews by quoting Voltaire. Such figures were not quarreling with Judaism; they were attributing innate wickedness to the Jewish character. This is racist anti-Semitism. Such opinions helped open the door to the horrors of our century.