"But here let us give the floor to Kandiaronk himself. The first of the Dialogues is about religious matters, in which Lahontan allows his foil calmly to pick apart the logical contradictions and incoherence of the Christian doctrines of original sin and redemption, paying particular attention to the concept of hell. As well as casting doubt on the historicity of scripture, Kandiaronk continually emphasizes the fact that Christians are divided into endless sects, each convinced they are entirely right and that all the others are hell-bound. To give a sense of its flavour:
Kandiaronk: Come on, my brother. Don’t get up in arms… It’s only natural for Christians to have faith in the holy scriptures, since, from their infancy, they’ve heard so much of them. Still, it is nothing if not reasonable for those born without such prejudice, such as the Wendats, to examine matters more closely. However, having thought long and hard over the course of a decade about what the Jesuits have told us of the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit, any Wendat could give you twenty reasons against the notion. For myself, I’ve always held that, if it were possible that God had lowered his standards sufficiently to come down to earth, he would have done it in full view of everyone, descending in triumph, with pomp and majesty, and most publicly… He would have gone from nation to nation performing mighty miracles, thus giving everyone the same laws. Then we would all have had exactly the same religion, uniformly spread and equally known throughout the four corners of the world, proving to our descendants, from then till ten thousand years into the future, the truth of this religion. Instead, there are five or six hundred religions, each distinct from the other, of which according to you, the religion of the French, alone, is any good, sainted, or true. [35]
The last passage reflects perhaps Kandiaronk’s most telling point: the extraordinary self-importance of the Jesuit conviction that an all-knowing and all-powerful being would freely choose to entrap himself in flesh and undergo terrible suffering, all for the sake of a single species, designed to be imperfect, only some of which were going to be rescued from damnation anyway. [36]"
[35] 1704: 106–7. Cited references are to the 1735 English edition of Dialogues, but the translation in this instance is a combination of that, Mann’s (2001: 67–8), and our own. Subsequent translations are our own, based on the 1735 edition.
[36] ‘Assuming he is so powerful and great, how likely is it that such an unknowable being would have made himself into a man, dwelt in misery, and died in infamy, just to work off the sin of some ignoble creature who was as far beneath him as a fly is beneath the sun and the stars? Where does that leave his infinite power? What good would it do him, and what use would he make of it? For my part, it seems to me that to believe in a debasement of this nature is to doubt the unimaginable sweep of his omnipotence, while making extravagant presumptions about ourselves.’ (cited in Mann 2001: 66)
— "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow
