On the Order of the Illuminati

gradually become his own. He therefore decided to turn the Order he had founded into a school of Enlightenment, and its secret was to be nothing less than the open explanation of those principles drawn from the aforementioned books. Regarding religion, the great secret was this: that Christianity was merely deception and superstition, and that Deism A belief system that acknowledges a Creator based on reason but rejects supernatural revelation or divine intervention. or the so-called Religion of Reason, and Naturalism The philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded. were the truly genuine religions. Even if the name of the former was allowed to remain, it was stripped of everything that made it a positive religion A "positive religion" refers to a faith based on specific revealed truths and established institutions (like the Bible or the Church), as opposed to "natural religion" derived from logic alone. in such a way that nothing but pure Naturalism remained. Weishaupt himself said, therefore, that he would leave the name of Christianity intact and substitute Reason in its place. Indeed, because Weishaupt recommended great caution to one of his assistants regarding a new convert original: "Proselyten" who had declared himself very zealous for the truth of the immortality of the soul, it is evident from this that in these secrets of anti-Christian godlessness, even this truth was rejected. Regarding the State, these secrets contained the foolish teachings of universal Equality and Liberty, of returning humanity to that original independence in which they allegedly existed before the establishment of civil societies; and what therein