Peter Adamson
speaker
1,322 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard today
Peter Adamson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Probably right here, around the turn of the eighteenth century.
We have a very ample work from the pen of Jean Meslier, a so-called testament, in which he excoriated Christian religion and denied the very existence of God.
Ironically enough, he was a priest, a rather obscure one who, to all accounts, led a quiet and morally upright life.
But the testament shows that behind this facade was an inner turmoil, even rage.
He explains that he took holy orders to please his parents, but always hated carrying out his priestly tasks, particularly all the idolatrous and superstitious celebrations of masses, and the vain and ridiculous administrations of sacraments that I had to do.
This remark comes early in the text, and Meslier is just getting started.
He provides an avalanche of arguments to undermine belief in Christianity.
There's no reason to prefer it to other religions.
For instance, other creeds, including the pagan ones, claim to be based on miracles like those performed by Christ.
In fact, Christians are required to believe absurdities not found in other religions, like the dogma of the Eucharist, which amounts to idol worship, except that in this case, the idol is made of flour and water, rather than the stone and metal of pagan idols.
If anything then, Christianity is even less worthy of belief than other religions.
The fact that Christians disagree and fight amongst themselves is another strike against them and is typical of the way that blind faith leads to violence.
As for the Bible, the Old Testament endorses the horrors of animal sacrifice and preposterously claims that God chose the Jewish people over others, which would be flagrantly unjust.
While the Gospels are full of internal contradictions.
This shows that the authors were not inspired by God and that they did not have enough reason or natural talent to know how to edit a story well.
We might expect that Meslier would follow this with a more philosophical, rationalist account of God, like the deism that would be embraced by some in coming generations.
And Meslier is certainly a rationalist.
He says that his arguments are the fruit of long reflection using only the natural light of reason.
But this light has revealed to him that God doesn't exist at all.
Unsurprisingly, he invokes the problem of evil as the main argument that tells against God's existence, sarcastically remarking that Christians call God a father, but if so, then this is a father who has abandoned his children to all manner of suffering and evil.
Showing 101–120 of 1,322 · page 6 of 67
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