"In all ages self-styled sages (or philosophers), without paying enough attention to the worth of the disposition to good in human nature, have exhausted themselves in repellent, partly disgusting parables, which represent our earthly world, the dwelling place of humanity, as contemptible: (1) As an inn (caravansarai), as that dervish regards it, where everyone arriving there on his life’s journey must be prepared to be driven out soon by his successor; (2) as a penitentiary - an opinion to which the Brahmanists, Tibetans, and other sages of the Orient (and even Plato) were attached - a place of chastisement and purification for fallen spirits driven out of heaven, who are now human or animal souls; (3) as a madhouse, where each not only annihilates his own intents, but where each adds every thinkable sorrow to the other, and moreover holds the skill and power to do this to be the greatest honour; finally (4), as a cloaca, where all the excrement from the other worlds has been deposited. The latter notion is in a certain way original, and for it we have a Persian wit to thank; he transposed paradise, the dwelling place of the first human couple, into heaven, where there was a garden with ample trees richly provided with splendid fruits, whose digested residue, after the couple’s enjoyment of them, vanished through an unnoticed evaporation; the exception was a single tree in the middle of the garden, which bore a fruit which was delicious but did not dry up in this way. As it now happened, our first parents now lusted after it, despite the prohibition against tasting it, and so there was no other way to keep heaven from being polluted except to take the advice of one of the angels who pointed out to them the distant earth, with the words: “There is the toilet of the whole universe,” and then carried them there in order to relieve themselves, but then flew back to heaven leaving them behind. That is how the human race is supposed to have arisen on earth. "

Kant, The End of All Things