Manuel de Freitas - A Arte de Não Acreditar em Nada / Livro dos Três Impostores

Long before the rise of Protestants who defied the Catholic Church, long before priests and statesmen were forced to extinguish their pyres, the restless minds of atheists and agnostics were already seething in secrecy.

That is what is revealed in the two blasphemous pamphlets gathered here, organized and introduced by Raoul Vaneigem. On one side, The Art of Not Believing in Anything — a fiery text that led its author, Geoffroy Vallée, at the age of twenty-four, to be hanged in public and burned alive in 1574 — is a direct hit aimed at religion, accusing it of obscurantism, of mass-producing cretins, fanatical followers, and the willfully ignorant. On the other side, The Book of the Three Impostors, by an anonymous author, is a mythical work that may have circulated in manuscript form during the Middle Ages, presented here in the two known versions (one written in the 17th century, the other in the 18th). It directly attacks the prophets of the three Abrahamic faiths — Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad — using fierce invective and unmasking them as charlatans skilled in oratory, mystical illusionists with megalomaniacal intentions. What both works share is a heretical desire to challenge oppression. Today, they help dismantle the idea of a time wholly anesthetized by faith and submission to self-flagellation, offering early signs that wherever tyranny arises, resistance will rise to meet it.