In his biography of Descartes, Richard A. Watson alludes to the French Cardinal Jacques Davy du Perron, who the philosopher derived, apparently, his Peerage title of Mr Perron. Before reaching as high ecclesiastical category, Cardinal, made a devastating attack on atheism and gave several proofs of the irrefutable existence of God in audience granted by Enrique III, King of France. The King made him know as soon as he felt his eloquence and his theological preparation. Act followed, writes Watson, Du Perron objected, with modesty, that didn’t matter, and offered to return the next day and use the same tests to argue for atheism and prove that God does not exist.

Enrique is shocked and expelled Du Perron from the Court. Not for a long time, because his Golden tongue was useful. When religion becomes a reason for conflicts in vast areas of the planet, this anecdote has validity today. It is worth remembering that you occurred in the second half of the 16th century, when France he bled in the wars of religion between Catholics and Protestants, with its sequel of executions by hanging or the bonfire, edicts about religious practices, mass killings of those who professed no own religion, conspiracies, and conspiracies without story. If what happened in the French Court had reached diffusion among the people – as the media allow it today-, this it had been easier to know that there actually was a struggle for power. Not only within France, among the most ambitious and influential strains, but also between the powers of modern Europe, where the papacy was still intervening. That would have not prevented the blood shed in the so-called night of San Bartolome, the mass murder of Protestants, but the prevailing passions had been tempered. Little more than one century later many Russian citizens killed in the struggle between supporters of extensive with two or three fingers, at the time of Europeanizing reforms with which the Tsar Pedro I el Grande wanted modernize by force to their routine and superstitious minions.