Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances. It is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.
Evil is the radiation of the human consciousness in certain transitional positions. It is not actually the sensual world that is amere appearance; what is so is the evil of it, which, admittedly, is what constitutes the sensual world in our eyes.
Let us be done with the notion that religion is confined to petty pieties and small constraints. All too often people who have possessed these pieties have wrought great evil.
But men are now united in states; that work is done; why now maintain exclusive devotion to one's own state, when this produces terrible evils for all.
The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
To be effective, morality has to be reasoned (or worked out). To want ("vouloir", Fr.) to repress evil only by coercion, and to obtain morality by a sort of training with the help of constraint, without motivating it from within, is to make it an unnatural result, devoided of lastind value.