The Religious Ideas Of Voltaire And Confucianism

Voltaire was a neutral in religion thought. He was a deist between the religious and the antitheist. The religious believe that the God creates the world, and lull people's thoughts by religion. Voltaire was against it. As a physicist, Holbach thought that the religion is from the ignorance of the nature. The religion takes advantage of the people's ignorance, creates a series of theories. The theories didn't care about present life and told people church was the only way to the God. So Holbach thought the religion must be eliminated, while Rousseau appreciate the God from the bottom of heart. The belief to the God was from the perceptual or the rational. that is the greatest divarication between Rousseau and Voltaire.Voltaire's religion thoughts were a trinity of anti-church, deism and tolerant of religious. He thought that it is the unwisdom and superstition near at hand, not the God far off the horizon to grab the people's treasure. The autarchy of church and the greedy of throne change people's life. Therefore, to be against the autarchy of the church is the solution to save the confused peasants. At the same time, to prevent the regeneration of other forms autarchies must put the tolerance into practice. All of these concerned are the deism. Voltaire's deism and the thought of tolerance are agreed with the Fatality and Benevolence of Confucius respectively. So in some certain sense, it is the Confucian that affected the Voltaire's religious attitudes. Confucian is a thought of standing in worldly affairs, and it concerns the practice to impact the Voltaire's religious-centered thoughts, influencing him to notice the fields out of religious and come into the vulgarization. For Voltaire, to be vulgarization is to find a truth and a universal theory separated from the religious. Voltaire then took the truth to struggle with the anti-religions.