>“People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!”<
Several of the Founding Fathers considered themselves to be deists or held beliefs very similar to that of traditional Deists, including Franklin, Jefferson, Paine and Ethan Allen.[12]
Deists typically reject supernatural events (prophecy, miracles) and tend to assert that God does not intervene with the affairs of human life and the natural laws of the universe. What organized religions see as divine revelation and holy books, most deists see as interpretations made by other humans, rather than as authoritative sources. Deists believe that God's greatest gift to humanity is not religion, but the ability to reason.
Also
The Age of Enlightenment (French: Siècle des Lumières; Italian: Secolo dei Lumi, or Illuminismo; German: Zeitalter der Aufklärung; Spanish: Siglo de las Luces or Ilustración; Swedish: Upplysningen; Polish: Oswiecenie.; Portuguese: Século das Luzes or Iluminismo) was an eighteenth-century movement in Western philosophy. It was an age of optimism, tempered by the realistic recognition of the sad state of the human condition and the need for major reforms. The Enlightenment was less a set of ideas than it was a set of attitudes. At its core was a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals. Some classifications of this period also includes the late 17th century, which is typically known as the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism.[1]
The term "Age of Enlightenment" can more narrowly refer to the intellectual movement of The Enlightenment, which advocated reason as the primary basis of authority. Developing in France, Britain and Germany, the Enlightenment influenced most of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The era is marked by such political changes as governmental consolidation, nation-creation, greater rights for common people, and a decline in the influence of authoritarian institutions such as the nobility and church.
There is no consensus on when to date the start of the age of Enlightenment, and a number of scholars simply use the beginning of the eighteenth century or the middle of the seventeenth century as a default date.[2] Many scholars use the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars (1804–15) as a convenient point in time with which to date the end of the Enlightenment. |
