 However, Cotta also says that while it might be difficult to deny the existence of the gods in a public assembly, it should be easy to do so in the sort of meeting they are currently having (1.61). He later adds the thesis that anthropomorphic gods were either thought up by philosophers to encourage ordinary people to turn from vice to worship or were a product of a superstition that considered that the worship of concrete images allowed access to the gods themselves (1.77). He then presses the idea that the non-interventionist gods of the Epicureans are fatal to religion (1.116–7, 1.121), while characterising under the same heading, as ‘utterly destructive of religion’, those who claim that the notion of immortal gods is a fiction invented by the wise to lead people unsusceptible to reason to do, through religion, their duty (1.118). Cotta does not say that this analysis of the origin of the gods is incorrect; rather, he implies that its public dissemination would undermine the very aim that the analysis posits as an explanation.