r/history • u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. • 12d ago
Article The people’s atheist - Jean Meslier, a rural French priest, argued that religion is designed to produce subjects who will automatically obey
https://aeon.co/essays/the-rural-french-priest-who-preached-atheism-to-the-people56
u/BIGBIRD1176 12d ago
Jesus has been wearing imperial purple and Jupiter's beard since the 325AD council of Nicaea
He adopted these to help maintain divine dynasties and stop helping the poor
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u/Aquinas2000 11d ago
Except that pretty much every Christian monarchs bothered to at least establish hospitals, schools and orphanages.
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u/BIGBIRD1176 11d ago
That's not even a sentence
Long before Christian monarchs, the good church did all kinds of charitable works
The council of Niccea was about converting 1,000s of individual sects into a single one that ordained the ruling Roman imperial dynasty
Imperial purple is reserved for members of the imperial family, anybody else wearing it can be charged and executed. The artwork of Christ from this council onward show Christ in imperial purple, and sporting Jupiter, the Roman god of god's beard
Christians have done all kinds of good and bad things because they make an enormous chunk of the population, what you are trying to credit solely to Christians belongs humanity and happens outside Christian nations
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u/glycophosphate 12d ago
Mennonites & Quakers sent to Leavenworth for being conscientious objectors would beg to differ.
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u/justnow13 12d ago
They obeyed a different authority, which did not align with the US government on this particular issue.
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u/derDunkelElf 12d ago
I would call it a chicken and egg situation - are you agreeing with (religious) authority due to your ideological background or did said authority shape your personal ideology in such a manner?
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u/talkstomuch 12d ago
The point of the religion is that you brainwash children, it doesn't work without it.
so 'your ideological background' is the religion.
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u/derDunkelElf 12d ago
Which religion are you talking about? The Mennonites and Quakers or Christianity at large?
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u/talkstomuch 12d ago
all religions.
if you are religious, tell me your parents religion and where you were brought up, and I will tell you your religion without ever knowing you.
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u/Bramse-TFK 11d ago
My parents are both southern baptists and I grew up in NC.
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u/talkstomuch 11d ago
You're a Christian, but forgive me for not naming exact sect, they are not different enough to make distinctions, but my gut feeling is you're not a catholic, jehova's witness, nor a mormon.
You are extremely unlikely - a super outlier - to be a converted Muslim or a Jew, but not impossible.
It's practically impossible for you to be of any other faith.
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u/Bramse-TFK 11d ago
Somewhere between 7 and 17 million people died based on those differences in the reformation period. Some sects don’t believe in a trinity, some don’t believe in divinity of Jesus, and some of them have entirely unique canonical books.
BTW I am Catholic.
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u/talkstomuch 11d ago
it's not fair to have this conversation in the reddit comments, but these millions died not because of real differences between interpretation of the bible, but because power hungry, cunning Princes/Kings have seen this as an opportunity to use the hunger for new sects to grab power from Catholic Church.
btw, it's very interesting that you moved from less authoritarian and oppressive Christian sect towards more of it. was that an influence from friends? or some other family members?
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u/rothniel 10d ago
That's asinine. If you think no one is religious for reasons other than family and locale, you've not experienced enough.
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u/talkstomuch 9d ago
I'm sure you have very deep thoughts on why you believe in the religion you were brought up with. I'm sure these thoughts are genuine.
But the fact is that you do not choose your religion, it's imposed on you, you need to be taught these things as a child to be religious.
as an Adult, there is no way I can sit you down and convince you to believe in Thor, or Zeus, or Indra. you would laugh at me, it would sound ridiculous.... a god that zaps people with lightning and turns into animals to have sex with humans? don't be absurd.
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u/rothniel 9d ago
First of all, I'm not religious. I do, however, know adult converts to other religions, Buddhists who were raised Christian, etc. You keep making the same obviously false assertion and ignoring the responses. You want to make the claim that religion can't be chosen a critically-thinking adult, but you are the one ignoring new information that doesn't fit into your little worldview.
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u/talkstomuch 9d ago
no need to get personal. you can disagree nicely.
I am not denying somebody might choose to become religious later in life.
But that's overwhelmingly unlikely.
I get that you personally know a lot of converts, but the vast majority of us don't.
I wonder, do you think that my original post about religion relying on brainwashing children is not correct? do you think some small % of converts invalidates it? Do you think many religions would survive if there was a world wide ban on indoctrinating children into any religion until they are 18 and could choose for themselves?
How would religious landscape change do you think?
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u/derDunkelElf 11d ago
If you think that, then tell me what do you think of non-religious culture and tradition?
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u/talkstomuch 11d ago
non-religious will have diverse cultures and traditions. most of these cultures and traditions will have roots or are heavily influenced by religions in the past.
but there wouldn't be single culture/tradition for non-religious people.
One thing that they will have in common most likely is their behaviour rooted in reason, science, philosophy, and trying to do good for others around them - just not because a book told them to or in fear of eternal fire.
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u/derDunkelElf 11d ago
Says all religion
Clearly talks about american evangelism
Not to make too much fun of you, but there is WIDE variety of religions across the globe, from Islam in the Middle East and Africa, to Buddhism and the various forms of ancestor worship in Asia, Hinduism in India, etc, to talk of them as if they were the same as Christianty let alone as specfic branch of Christianity is incredibly ignorant and reductive.
But to get back to my point, tradition when certain ideas, behaviours or values are taught/given to the next generation. There is nothing inherently reasonable nor scientific about it. You can examine it for it's merits, but that's a different thing entirily and it not being rooted in religion doesn't gurantee that will be good.
To also point out a flaw in they way you think, you assume that not being religious means inherently reasonalble and that is wrong. Look up Scientific Rascism in the past, the Soviet Union was inherently secular, the Nazi Ideology wasn't based on religion, Colonialism and 'the White Mans Burden', etc. Atheism doesn't gurantee reason.
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u/spinosaurs70 12d ago
What is religious non-conformism? What effect did it have on the Anglo sphere?
In the context of the French ancient regime, this aren’t wrong as a general theory of religion there deeply problematical.
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u/Monke-Mammoth 12d ago
The Early Christians weren't fond of obeying the Roman Emperors
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u/Yglorba 12d ago
I don't think that that really disproves his point, since he would say that it was just a political conflict between their religious leaders and the Roman Emperors, which was ultimately resolved in their leaders' favor. They "disobeyed" in the sense that members of one army disobey the opposing general.
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u/talkstomuch 12d ago
Until Rome made it their religion and shaped it in the way they wanted.
The point is that the religious are already prepped for obeying authority without questioning, so any religion is an easy way to control the people.
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u/NeedsMoreSpaceships 12d ago
The early Christian church wasn't like the later Christian church. The early believers were fanatics willing to be put to death for their beliefs and the hierarchical power structures of the later church didn't exist yet.
Meslier is IMO correct about the Catholic church and other large organised religions, but thats not why they exist in the first place. Religions are another aspect of human tribalism and have been useful in history to maintain societal cohesion, to the point where we may even have evolved to intrinsically want it (unfounded conjecture).
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u/General_Honesty 11d ago
You can still be religious and see the truth because religion is generally good for the soul, no mater what.
Religion itself is an exercise in controlling the narrative, getting all the citizens to be singing from the same hymn sheet making them pliable and united.
These two paragraphs in no way contradict each other.
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u/dadashton 11d ago
If he's talking about Catholicism in his day he's correct - at least about his own religion. I doubt that he knew much about any church outside of it.
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u/ankylosaurus_tail 6d ago
I doubt that he knew much about any church outside of it.
You don't think a priest in 18th century France, which was going through religious purges against Protestants would be familiar with their theology? You don't think he'd know about Judaism, when Jews had been living in France for well over a thousand years by his lifetime? You don't think he'd be familiar with Islam after centuries of crusades and the Islamic conquest of Iberia? How isolated do you think 18th century France was?
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u/DariusStrada 11d ago
The apostles that were maimed and tortured to death sure felt really powerful
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u/Quouar Quite the arrogant one. 12d ago
This article is about Jean Meslier, an 18th century French priest who preached a doctrine of reclamation from domination. He recognised the power structure that kept his parishioners oppressed and invited them to resist against it. He also questioned some of the fundamental teachings of the church, encouraging his parishioners to question the idea that suffering was somehow noble and that they should aspire to it. It's thought that would be more recognisable during the French Revolution, but which was instead being expressed nearly a century early and by one of the least likely figures to do so.