In chapter twenty one, he even refers to the bible as the “big book.” Voltaire did not believe in original sin but the mere human standard created by human kind. “The fruits of the earth are a common heritage of all, to which each man has equal rights” (437) Everything that Pangloss taught Candide was related to the bible. In fact, the moral principles created during the Enlightenment could have come directly from the bible. The only difference is that it is reduced to a standard that humans believe could actually achieve. Though the mere human nature of people is to be “liars, traitors, ingrates, thieves, weaklings, sneaks, cowards, backbiters, gluttons, drunkards, misers, climbers, killers, calumniators, sensualists, fanatics, hypocrites, and fools” (460). As humans we each have individual temptations through human nature, but in the bible, human nature is referred to as sin; we are all sinners. Being a deist, it keeps Voltaire a little on the fence. “He admires Milton’s Paradise Lost and that the novella concludes with the protagonist cultivating a garden suggests that Voltaire may have been rethinking the story of Adam and Eve in his own imaginative way” (423). God has given us free will and in the story of Adam and Eve, Eve had the free choice of whether to eat the fruit. Though Voltaire is so wrapped up in the reason things happen, he cannot understand God in the fact that …show more content…
People have the wrong idea in worshipping a religion and the ways of the religion instead of worshipping the one God and following what he says. The Enlightenment placed in the minds of the people that we must live by the world’s list of standards; so when people look at religion, it is a list of rules that one must follow. “The true church is an invisible one, it exists only in the hearts of men.” The ways in which people live today should not be by a set of rules and ideas that an Enlightenment thinker developed. Most of the standards approved by the Enlightenment thinker is through bits and pieces of the Protestant Scholasticism, the Jesuit Scholasticism, and the theory of the Divine Rights from the Church of England. All pointing to the religious belief that God exists. If everyone believed that the church is in the hearts of men living through the Holy Spirit, human standard would not be a factor. God standard would be the only standard in this divided world. That is how the world will progress. That is how the Church will rise up. To stay a divided nation in religion is to stay a divided nation in liberalism, racism, nationalism, secularism, communism, and