Introduction

All these writers saw ‘Religion’ as a major problem for civilized societies, and as a paradigm case of what could go wrong in human affairs when human beings departed from the law of nature and embraced priestcraft and superstition. Many of them explored a naturalistic interpretation of ‘Religion’ which excluded arbitrary supernatural revelation, although not necessarily supernatural influences. In contrast to Hobbes, who argued that religion arose out of fear and ignorance, most of these writers posited a primitive natural religion, based on just notions of God and our duty. Many of them were indebted to the philosophy and critical sociology of religion which they found in a range of Roman Stoic writers (Seneca, Cato, Tacitus, Horace, Lucian), and, in particular, in Cicero's De divinitate and De natura deorum. This philosophy and critical sociology of religion, with its necessitarian theism and its sharp distinction between religion and superstition, gave them a perspective with which to read ecclesiastical history in terms of a sociology of error, a psychology of interest and a theory of the fall of humanity through religion. Blount, for example, wrote that:

The claim that humankind had been seduced from an original law or religion of nature by priests who pretended to revelations to get wealth and power went with hostile interpretations of external positive religion. Religion of this sort, they argued, was based on superstitious notions of deity and made humanity superstitious and cruel: