An Attachment to the Marvelous

Look through the whole order of nature, and this solemn truth is clearly perceived, that every being possessed of feeling must eternally be exposed to a vast variety of complicated evils, painful sensation, and diversified misfortune, resulting from the

constitution of the universe, and the laws by which it is governed. The same reasoning will apply to all the higher operations of nature, and those astonishing phenomena that surprise and terrify the mind of man! Earthquakes, volcanoes, lightning, inundations, are all the result of the operation of physical laws, and it is impossible to prevent the misery which they occasion, without a suspension or violation of the laws by which they were produced....

It is here that superstition has raised a rampart impregnable to the attacks of reason. The pride, the fanaticism, and the intemperate zeal of man will never cease to mislead his judgment; cause the energies of intellect to diverge from the line of truth, and to subject him to the baneful influence of opinions, erroneous and destructive in their consequences. Man is ignorant, and this ignorance produces in him an attachment to the marvellous; he is both delighted and terrified with strange and unnatural appearances, with events out of the common order of things, with those phenomena which approach or seem to approach the idea of a miraculous occurrence; he seems to take a pride also in attributing these events to the special interventions of Divine Providence, to the supernatural operations of a vindictive God; to the cruel and arbitrary arrangements of an omnipotent tyrant, to the malice and premeditated revenge of that ferocious being, who exists only in his own distorted imagination, and the admission of whose existence would be the sure presage of the annihilation of the vast fabric of nature. The fanaticism and intemperate zeal of all supernatural religion has ever desired to represent the God of nature as partial in his operations, revengeful in his intentions, and inconsiderably destructive in all those arrangements of which he is supposed to be the author and contriver. All the various religious parties and sectaries that have ever existed on earth, have pretended that God was enlisted in their service, and consequently, that he had proclaimed war, and the most implacable resentment against every other man or set of men who had not embraced the true and orthodox faith.

--Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of 

the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species