Voltaire And Satan Poem by gershon hepner

Requested on his death-bed to denounce
the Satan Voltaire said that this was not
the time for making foes. God gives discounts
in the inferno where it’s very hot
because the Satan has more power there
where it is very certain he exists;
no need there to invent him and his flair
for always fighting God whom he resists
although, like man, he is uncertain whether
God merely is a figment of his mind,
invented both by him and man together
before by man he strangely was maligned.

Andrew Higgins writes in the WSJ on March 6,2006 (“Blame It on Voltaire: Muslims Ask to Cancel a Play”) how Muslims have demanded that the inhabitants of Saint-Genis-Pouilly cancel a performance of Voltaire’s play “Fanaticism or Mahomet the Prophet”. Jews have managed to accept with resignation Voltaire’s sometime fierce expressions of anti-Semitism but it appears that Muslims are less tolerant of the man who was in many ways the father of the Enlightenment.

3/6/06