Today we honor the great French author and philosopher Francois Marie Arouet (1694-1778) who wrote under the nom de plume  VOLTAIRE. While he called himself a deist, he may have been an atheist, using deism as a shield to enable him to speak his mind.  Nonetheless, he was often thrown in the Bastille for his attacks on the intolerance and persecution practiced by traditional religion.

The church-led cruelty of the Inquisition was in his thoughts when he concocted his brilliant satire, Candide.He said, with biting sarcasm, “the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.” It is difficult to believe Voltaire was allowed to live after making the following shocking statement: “Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world,” adding that “every sensible man, every honest man, must hold the Christian sect in horror.”

But Voltaire lived long and well.  In Paris there is a street and restaurant named after him. Another old eating place, Le Procope, draws fame from his having guzzled so much coffee there. In his country estate called Ferney (which is now the Institut et Musee Voltaire) he carried on a lengthy correspondence with Catherine the Great who commissioned a statue of him which still stands in St.  Petersburg’s Hermitage.

For his birthday, if you want to drink like Voltaire, remember that he sipped 40 cups of coffee with chocolate a day. And let’s have songs, because Voltaire said,  “Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”