Merciless Distributors of Dreadful Punishments
This terrible representation of the divinity, as destitute of truth as it was pernicious in its consequences, was, at length, diversified and decompounded, and afterwards recombined for purposes of systematic terror; the partial distribution of favours, and the dreadful torture of the human race under the name of divine vengeance. The professors of different religious opinions having armed their God in their own cause, became the merciless distributors of those dreadful punishments and calamities which they expected would result from the character of that barbarous divinity, which their imaginations had described. The malice of the individual, the savage cruelty of man, was transferred to this imaginary God, and he appeared in turn the object of terror to every living mortal. --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species