In particular, Hume argues, monotheistic religions tend to be more intolerant and hypocritical, result in greater intellectual absurdities, and foster socially undesirable "monkish virtues", such as mortification, abasement, and passive suffering.
But such is the frailty of human reason, and such the irresistible contagion of opinion, that even this deliberate doubt could scarcely be upheld; did we not enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape, into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy.
Hume tries to exclude religion from our reasoning faculty of right and wrong in that we make our decisions based on the over-riding passion during that moment.
The essay's focus on the subject (the viewer, the reader) rather than the object (the painting, the book) is typical of the British "sentimentalists" or moral sense theorists of the eighteenth century.
Unlike the French philosophers of the 18th century, who sought an objective definition of beauty, the British school tended to look for the connections between taste and aesthetic judgments.
Hume took as his premise that the great diversity and disagreement regarding matters of taste had two basic sources – sentiment, which was to some degree naturally varying, and critical facility, which could be cultivated.
Each person is a combination of these of two sources, and Hume endeavours to delineate the admirable qualities of a critic, that they might augment their natural sense of beauty into a reliable faculty of judgment.