Yet another kind of realism

Essentially, this is the ancient and cynical view that religion is a useful coercive delusion fostered among the people by the elites to enlist loyalty and obedience, condemned and turned to scorn by the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment.

Google “The Book of the Three Impostors” and consider the related view that Mohamed, Jesus, and even Moses not only exploited but personally invented such politically useful fantasies, advocated by no means uniquely by Spinoza.

One does not have to be an atheist to hold either opinion, or an amoralist.

Voltaire was neither, and yet he was one of the first and most relentless enemies of supernaturalism and every form of revealed, miraculous, organized religion, and one of the most effective who have denounced it as a political con.

Though it was an attack on such political exploitation of the credulity of the masses by Mohamed and his lieutenants for which Voltaire sought the patronage of the pope, Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete was condemned by the authorities of his time as targeting religion in general, Catholicism in particular, and the clergy and political elites of the age.

Not long ago, European Muslims prevented the play being put on in Geneva, denouncing it as hate literature derogatory of their prophet and their religion.

Compare this play with Moliere’s Tartuffe, which portrayed religious devotion as the masquerade of a confidence trickster seeking financial and sexual advantage.

That play was banned but eventually performed with the sponsorship of an irreligious king over the objections and protests of religious nobles, clerics, organizations, and authorities - objections of a kind which have continued into our own century.

It is an interesting question whether it would ever have been performed, and even whether Moliere would have lived, had he, instead of Voltaire a century later, written and attempted to present Le fanatisme.