Religion

[Michael Hoover]

> Were the Enlightenment thinkers "aggressively atheist"?  A few of them were
> (e.g. Baron d'Holbach), but the majority were not.  Locke recommended
> toleration and argued that the care of the souls should not be committed to
> the civil magistrate, because "true and saving religion consists in the
> inward persuasion of the mind, without which nothing is acceptable to God."
> Newton believed that Harmony in the System was an argument for a Deity.
> Montesquieu thought it a good thing to have several religions in a State.
> Voltaire was against fanaticism and superstition (as all Enlightenment
> thinkers were) but was not against religion as such, which, according to
> him, "exists to keep mankind in order, and to make men merit the goodness
> of God by their virtue."  Rousseau was a Deist, certain "that the whole
> universe is one design, and sufficiently displays one intelligent agent,"
> who regulates it to preserve "the present and established order of things."
> Jefferson called for toleration, but he said he was a Christian.  So did
> Franklin and Paine.
> In other words, the title of Kant's book on religion _Religion within the
> Boundaries of Mere Reason_ seems to describe the dominant attitude of the
> Enlightenment thinkers.
> Yoshie:

Wasn't most of Enlightenment crowd deist?  Don't recall who suggested
that some attempted to hold onto security blanket by referring to a
'reasonable Christianity'.

Jefferson called himself a 'real' Christian to distinguish himself from 
Christians who called him an infidel.  He claimed that he was disciple 
of doctrines of Jesus in contrast to those he called Platonists who 
he claimed drew their dogmas from what Jesus neither said nor saw.  And 
beyond thinking that Jesus was a groovy guy, TJ never doubted either 
existence of or rational planning of supreme creator.

Rousseau is kind of odd man out among Enlightenment crowd, repudiated
by likes of Voltaire & Diderot.  If memory serves, R claimed (in
_First Discourse, Science and the Arts_) that notion that God made man 
good but man wasted it by creating evil society flashed before him when 
he was struck by God.     Michael Hoover