Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary was published in 1764 without his name. Voltaire wrote that a true god 'surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough,' or inspired 'books, filled with contradictions, madness, and horror.' He also published excerpts of Testament of the Abbe Meslier, by an atheist priest, in Holland, which advanced the Enlightenment.

His pamphlet, The Sermon on the Fifty (1762) went after transubstantiation, miracles, biblical contradictions, the Jewish religion, and the Christian God. Voltaire began to openly challenge Christianity, calling it 'the infamous thing.' He wrote Frederick the Great: 'Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.' Voltaire ended every letter to friends with 'Ecrasez l'infame' (crush the infamy - the Christian religion). To avoid Calvinist persecution, Voltaire moved across the border to Ferney, where the wealthy writer lived for 18 years until his death. Voltaire purchased a chateau in Geneva, where, among other works, he wrote Candide (1759). After the earthquake that leveled Lisbon in 1755, in which 15,000 people perished and another 15,000 were wounded, Voltaire wrote Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ( Poem on the Lisbon Disaster): 'But how conceive a God supremely good/ Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,/ Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?' Voltaire continued writing amusing but meaty philosophical plays and histories. In it the Deist candidly rejected immortality and questioned belief in God. In his memoirs, he wrote: 'I found, in 1733, a young woman who thought as I did, and decided to spend several years in the country, cultivating her mind.' He dedicated Traite de metaphysique to her. He met the 27 year old married mother when he was 39.

Voltaire wrote: 'The interest I have in believing a thing is not a proof of the existence of that thing.' Voltaire's French publisher was sent to the Bastille and Voltaire had to escape from Paris again, as judges sentenced the book to be 'torn and burned in the Palace.' Voltaire spent a calm 16 years with his deistic mistress, Madame du Chatelet, in Lorraine. The book also satirized the religious teachings of Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal, including Pascal's famed 'wager' on God. There he wrote Lettres philosophiques (1733), which galvanized French reform. Upon a second imprisonment, in which Francois adopted the pen name Voltaire, he was released after agreeing to move to London. He launched a lifelong, successful playwriting career in 1718, interrupted by imprisonment in the Bastille. Jesuit-educated, he began writing clever verses by the age of 12. In 1694, Age of Enlightenment leader Francois-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire, was born in Paris.

Candide text