Enlightenment And Religion Essay

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The term Enlightenment has many variations depending on the era and society, however, a broader understanding of the Enlightenment can be looked at as the spread of faith (Tignor, 535). It is important to keep in mind that this spread of faith is completed to sustain universal rights and laws. This particular spreading of faith is completed with the reasoning that it is for the better of mankind. In regards to the European Enlightenment, they focused on increasing literacy and critical thinking, and decreasing persecution due to religion (Tignor, 535). What is unique about the European Enlightenment is that they wanted to spread these new ideas throughout the population, not just to the wealthy (Tignor, 535). The ultimate goal of this Enlightenment was to, “change their contemporaries’ worldviews and to transform political and social …show more content…

Meaning that Enlightenment thinkers no longer wanted to focus on the idea of God’s practices in human life and nature (Tignor, 535). Instead, they wanted to spread objective knowledge that would become practice for all mankind. The idea behind this particular type of knowledge is that it does not associate itself with any religion, gender, political view, and/or class, therefore, it is universal (Tignor, 535). Although, this idea of universal and objective knowledge sounds wonderful it was very hard to obtain. Enlightenment thinkers found trouble in creating laws that would apply to all individuals and they realized that many of the wealthy were stuck in their ways or thoughts, so to speak (Tignor, 535). The origins of this thought came from the idea that Enlightenment thinkers believed that mankind is naturally good, but society ends up corrupting the good nature of mankind (Tignor, 538). However, with the use of reasoning Enlightenment thinkers believed they could create a society in which the society and the people were morally good (Tignor,

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