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Enlightenment era religious commentary was a response to the preceding century of religious conflict in Europe, especially the Thirty Years' War. [76] Theologians of the Enlightenment wanted to reform their faith to its generally non-confrontational roots and to limit the capacity for religious controversy to spill over into politics and ...
Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in the decades prior to 1789.
Enlightened absolutists held that royal power emanated not from divine right but from a social contract whereby a despot was entrusted with the power to govern through a social contract in lieu of any other governments. The monarchs of enlightened absolutism strengthened their authority by improving the lives of their subjects.
French thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment is considered to have been permeated with anti-religious views that began as deism in the sixteenth century by Pierre Viret and culminated as atheism in the eighteenth century by Voltaire and Rousseau. French Deism was anti-religious and shaded into atheism, pantheism, and skepticism.
[5] [6] Egalitarian doctrines have supported many modern social movements, including the Enlightenment, feminism, civil rights, and international human rights. [ 7 ] One key aspect of egalitarianism is its emphasis on equal opportunities for all individuals, regardless of their background or circumstances.
Some notions of righteousness present in ancient law and religion are sometimes retrospectively included under the term "human rights". While Enlightenment philosophers suggest a secular social contract between the rulers and the ruled, ancient traditions derived similar conclusions from notions of divine law, and, in Hellenistic philosophy, natural law.
In the Reformation and Counter-Reformation eras, Europe was a "persecuting society" which did not tolerate religious minorities or atheism. [4] Even in France, where the Edict of Nantes had been issued in 1598, then revoked in 1685, there was very little support for religious toleration at the beginning of the eighteenth century. [5]
Influenced by the 18th-century European Enlightenment and its own native American Philosophy, the American Enlightenment applied scientific reasoning to politics, science and religion, promoted religious tolerance, and restored literature, the arts, and music as important disciplines and professions worthy of study in colleges.