Anatole France
From Philosopedia.org
France, (Jacques) Anatole (16 April 1844 - 12 October 1924)
Anatole France’s Penguin Island (1908) has a nearsighted priest baptizing a large group, regretfully finding they are penguins - the trouble his act causes to the alarmed authorities in an animal-less Heaven makes this allegorical and satirical novel diabolically provocative.
Although he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, all his works were prohibited by the Vatican in 1922.
An atheist, France never accepted the historicity of Jesus. In fact, he once wrote favorably about Pontius Pilate. Philosophically, according to William F. Ryan, he stood somewhere between Epicurean thinking and contemporary existentialism “and was, in fact, among the first to pronounce the human condition and the state of the universe absurd.”
In contrast to St. John Chrysostom, who said, “Virginity stands as far above marriage as the heavens above the earth.” France held that of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
“If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing,” France once observed.
In a letter to the International Congress of Freethinkers at Paris in 1905, France wrote,
- The thoughts of the gods are not more unchangeable than those of the men who interpret them. They advance–but they always lag behind the thoughts of men. . . . The Christian God was once a Jew. Now he is an anti-Semite.
