Perhaps the Enlightenment and Scientism were inevitable after the social disruptions and violent upheavals of the Reformation. Some of this multi-faceted, multi-participant, multi-purposed open warfare was discussed previously in For God And Country. In retrospect, the seemingly easy beginnings of that great, massive, multi-national bloodletting by brother-against-brother should give us pause.

What was all that about? Essentially, it was all initiated by the fiery rhetoric of one man. And that proves how socially dangerous good and motivational rhetoric can be. That there were men who were oppressed cannot be denied; however, neither can it be denied that many or most who rallied to the Revolt were not oppressed at all, quite the contrary. Many of the most effective supporters were highly privileged, even royalty. As discussed at the previous link, the notion that the Reformation was purely and exclusively a religious thing is patently false. As in all wars, the prime goals became territorial, power and enrichment. Religion was an important factor, but in most cases it was an excuse more than a motivator. Greed was the major factor.

The Enlightenment and Scientism arose from the ashes of the Reformation. The whole Western notion of man being, theoretically, “freed from superstition” to pursue knowledge solely through human reason stemmed from Western man’s massively shaken faith in Divine Revelation.

That the Reformation weakened not only Christian unity, but Christian faith and belief itself cannot be denied. On the Continent, there were Four major competing Protestant gospel messages, plus the original Catholic Gospel, where before the Reformation there was One Christian voice. Then the British Reformation brought about a fifth, and there were Five (5) major competing Protestant gospels. It was getting easier to form a new “church.” The whole, sole reason for the very existence today of the Anglican Church rests exclusively upon the desire of a British king to divorce and remarry, and Catholicism’s refusal to allow him to do it. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.

How are Enlightenment and Scientism linked? In the Scientism article and elsewhere I have attacked Scientism, with good reason. In my view, the Enlightenment is falsely portrayed as an overall positive force for the advancement of Western thought. In truth, it was and is an overall negative force dragging Western Culture down. Indeed, it gave birth to Scientism. I link Enlightenment and Scientism together because I see them almost as the same thing; either one might not even exist without the other.

The Enlightenment is popularly portrayed as:

the reasoned path by which Western man developed from and through stages of ignorance, superstition and cruelty into societies that emphasized reason, knowledge and humanity, with moral norms and social rules based on those values.

It describes Western Civilization’s rise out of the so-called Dark Ages, through the mind-freeing Renaissance era and on into recognition of Secular Science in the great Age Of Discovery. Which, of course, brought about the Industrial Revolution, Capitalism and all the wealth associated with them. And there are large nuggets of truth throughout that history; I’m not saying that the whole history of it is false. Just the underlying theme of its absolute correctness and its strictly positive impact on Western Culture. This model of the progress of the Enlightenment and Scientism accentuates the thinking and great thinkers of the era, but it ignores or deemphasizes the social disruptions, wars and the shaking of the very foundations of Western Man’s Divine Ground Of Being.

Some questions to ponder as you read on might be, first,

if a man’s deepest held beliefs and values, if his very purpose for being and his whole sense of direction for his life is not to be religious, then, what exactly is it to be?

once a whole social order or a culture begins to predominantly deny or not recognize any authority higher than man’s reason, what are their cultural moral guidelines, which form their basis for their own civil law, to be based upon?

Well, it could be the ruler, or someone’s opinion, or the popular fad of the moment, or the latest discovery. But nothing solid, nothing fixed.

First of all, there was nothing particularly Dark about the Middle Ages. There were plagues, of course, but the worst plagues continued long into the Renaissance. The Middle Ages, thanks largely to the Catholic Church itself and various monastic orders within it, produced such major institutions as the modern banking system, the hospital and the university. For the fist time formal education was available to all men, including commoners. The very term Dark Ages is a myth. Advances were made in all fields of human knowledge throughout the Middle Ages.

But that fact opposes the Enlightenment and Scientism notion that religion and material science somehow oppose each other and cannot both be properly held and performed by the same mind. This notion is the source of the secularizing tendency of so-called enlightened thought. Another term for secularizing is religious cleansing. The commonly held belief is that one cannot do good science or even good reasoning if one holds to religious belief. The stronger the religious belief, the less reasoned the holder is supposed to be.

The “Voltaire Rescued Western Culture” myth. Voltaire is today idealized as somehow being a philosopher and a major leader of the Enlightenment; he would probably be surprised at that. He was an eloquent writer of poetry and prose, and he was very good at popularizing his own writing, through more writing. That appears to be the primary purpose for much of his rhetoric.

Voltaire was his pen-name, of course. His real name was François-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), and he was a popular essayist during the period. With great wit, he supported civil liberties, freedom of religion, the right to a fair trial and so forth. He wrote quite popular satirical polemics against Church dogma, but he was no philosopher, and, while he published “philosophical works,” he never published any new philosophy of his own. What he was exceptionally good at was the turning of the word, and the publicizing and popularizing of his own writing. He went through multiple imprisonments and exiles because of his witty and popular public attacks on both government and religion.

Voltaire’s contribution to Enlightenment and Scientism.

In an unsettled era of extreme social change, challenge and questions Voltaire wrote, in increasingly popular style, against the ancien regime. The whole theme involves a description of an unfair balance of power and wealth between The First Estate (the clergy), The Second Estate (the nobles), and The Third Estate (the commoners), who were burdened with nearly all taxes. In a theme that would become more and more common through Western history, in the theoretical absence of Heavenly perfection, what was sought and driven toward was a new man-made, strictly reason-based, Perfect Economic and Government System right here on Earth. A man made Worldly Heaven.

Now those who believed that worldly perfection was possible and who sought to design or establish it were, necessarily, atheists. But pure atheism was then, as it is now, and as it has always been everywhere, a very unpopular religious holding. Since the primary purpose of Voltaire’s writing was increasingly popular exposure of it, he adopted, at least publicly, Deism, so that he could continue with his popular polemics without being tainted by the extremely unpopular aroma of atheism. At least partially as a result of Voltaire’s extremely popular writing, Deism became an extremely popular religion-philosophy, especially among the intellectual elite of the era. As Deism became a raging fad, it also became recognized among the elite as the perfect political tool of the atheistic political man.

Interestingly, Voltaire remained a Catholic and occasionally attended Catholic liturgy even as he railed against her dogma, and he even built a rather substantial Catholic chapel for himself. Apparently some clergy accepted this, and so we see that ours is not the only era with obvious public heterodoxy displayed by clergy, and extreme public religious hypocrisy displayed by celebrity. Voltaire’s writing contributed greatly to the Enlightenment and Scientism, and to the notion of the goodness of that direction, and the notion that it was an improvement over the “superstition” of organized religion. Lots of people believe this today. This is how The Enlightenment is predominantly taught.

Enlightenment and Scientism Examined. But if we look this man-made, strictly reason-based thing called The Enlightenment, we immediately see some flaws, seen through the eyes of pure reason. From the very basis of it to the large and small projections from it, there are so many reason-based flaws as to render it fatally flawed, and quite unreasonable.

First of all, we know that the original basis for Judaism and Christianity is Revelation, in which God came to man and revealed Himself, as recorded through human history. We can argue about the truth of this revelation, but the vast history of it remains, and so there is, at least, historical evidence of it. In every other religion, it’s the other way round, and man came to god or gods, or somehow discovered him through seeking.

But what of the religion of atheism? What is its basis? An idea, an ephemeral thought, nothing more, and nothing less. No empirical evidence whatsoever, because the ephemeral or other-worldly cannot be proved or disproved by worldly material means. No history of any Revelation, no ancient handed-on stories – nothing whatsoever.

But what of the religion of Deism? What is its basis? An idea, an ephemeral thought, nothing more, and nothing less. No empirical evidence whatsoever, because the ephemeral or other-worldly cannot be proved or disproved by worldly material means. No history of any Revelation, no ancient handed-on stories – nothing whatsoever.

Both atheism and Deism, probably the most unpopular religious belief systems anywhere on Earth, then and now, have considerably less of a reasonable foundational basis than Judeo-Christianity. And atheism/Deism is the “reasonable” foundational basis for the Enlightenment and Scientism. Voltaire knew full well the popular, strong Christian religious sentiments just beneath the surface of his readers. That’s why he strongly opposed Democracy; in his view the people were not smart enough to rule themselves; what was needed was a monarchy ruled by a benign king.

I submit that that notion is ridiculous on its face, because it does not take into account the odds of the next king being benign. Like all revolutionary thinkers, Voltaire merely day-dreamed about one day achieving the perfect republic, ruled by the perfect ruler, like himself. In his view, the ignorant masses were in need of being taken care of by a benign ruler who knew better than they how to do it. Thus, the typical opposition to representative government by the Enlightenment and Scientism down through the centuries. In the Enlightenment and Scientism movement, those who would revolt against the elite – the Luthers, the Munzers, the Voltaires, the Robespierres, the Lenins, the Maos – become the new elite. Oppose the elite to become the elite. Equality for me, but not for thee.

I submit that atheism, Deism and even agnosticism are quite unreasonable faith-base belief systems with nothing whatsoever to back them up other than faith, and minority opinion. And it will be a minority opinion wherever you go on the Earth. Disciples claim that Judeo-Christianity is a silly superstition with no material basis. Well, it has a basis in history, and it has a stronger basis in popular support than do atheism, Deism and agnosticism. We cannot empirically prove that God exists is their claim; they cannot empirically prove that God does not exist is my claim. They have an interest only in things, not causes of things; Judeo-Christian disciples have an interest both in things and in the causes of things. Judeo-Christianity is therefore the more reasonable position. Enlightenment and Scientism aficionados have a great fear of the primal or first cause of all causes, and studiously avoid the topic.

Why should atheism, a tiny minority religion everywhere on Earth, insist that Judeo-Christianity prove it’s case regarding the existence of God? Should not the burden of proof rest on the shoulders of the minority opinion? If atheism is so certain, it should prove it’s case to the majority, if it can. Atheism is not anywhere near a majority religion anywhere. There are over one billion Catholics today, comprising more than half of considerably more than two billion Christians of all varieties. Atheism, supported by Enlightenment and Scientism thinking, feels that we, in our overwhelming majority, should just accept, on blind faith alone, their completely unsubstantiated conjecture regarding God. That’s just unreasonable. They need to guess again.

Terrorism of the Enlightenment and Scientism. The very thing it is touted to have brought us out of – some dark age of ignorance-based terror – the Enlightenment and Scientism authored in Europe. Robespierre, child of the Enlightenment that he was, wrote glowingly and passionately about the need for state terrorism, and introduced the first Great Terror in Europe. It was not religion, but the repudiation of religion, that fed the Guillotine in France. Radical anti-clericalism stood right beside radical anti-nobility, radical anti-aristocracy, and even radical anti-revolution so that there was only one voice to be heard in the land. It was the voice of the new elite class, the new terrorism, which was the Revolution, born of the Enlightenment and Scientism. And there was absolutely nothing reasonable about it.

Robespierre fed clerics, nuns, aristocrats and political enemies alike through the Guillotine, to the roars of the mob. Edgar Allen Poe would write an epitaph for Robespierre that said, roughly, do not mourn too much for him, for if he were still alive, then you would now be dead. The first state-sponsored terrorism in Europe came not from the Christian religion of Europe, but from the direct opposition and suppression of it. There was a new moral norm established in Europe, seeking to displace the old Judeo-Christian one, and it was a moral norm of terrorism and brute force, which was to become the quite typical moral norm of materialistic atheism.

Of course, the later spawn of Enlightenment and Scientism in the persons and associated movements of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini would make Robespierre and the French Revolution pale in comparison. None of these so-called Western Culture leaders or their movements represented Judeo-Christianity. Quite the opposite. It was pure materialistic atheism founded on Enlightenment and Scientism that brought about the gulags, the death camps, the enslavement of whole peoples and nations, the unspeakable atrocities committed against “inferior” peoples, and even genocide. All of which were perfectly moral in the eyes of the Enlightenment and Scientism.

The ends justified the means, therefore, it was moral. However . . .

Was any of it reasonable?

Let’s look at Darwinism. Take the whole notion, born of Enlightenment and Scientism thinkers such as Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood and Adolph Hitler, of the “inferior” races out-reproducing the “superior” races, prompting the first efforts at human bloodline and human population control by the state. To this very day you will find elitist “thinkers” who get all exercised over how the black race and the oriental race consistently out-reproduce the white race, and how that’s somehow a bad thing for the future of mankind. But, consider this: According to Darwin’s Natural Selection theory, and his Survival Of The Fittest theory, that would make the black race and the oriental race superior to the white race. After all, they successfully reproduced more. Right?

Right. So if he were true to absolute materialistic atheism and to the theoretically reasoned thinking of the Enlightenment and Scientism, Hitler would have been exterminating whites, himself included, and establishing black and/or oriental leadership in the West. Darwinism, a major denomination of the religious belief system of material atheism, was and is dogmatically held, in all its particulars, by all disciples of Enlightenment and Scientism.

Yet the way Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood and Adolph Hitler behaved was contrary to this purely reasoned materialistic, Natural Selection and Survival Of The Fittest purely dogmatic Darwinian approach. It may be seen that they opposed and even sought to defeat, through artificial means, the “natural” processes of Natural Selection and Survival Of The Fittest, through state controls. (You can read about Margaret in the Population Problem page and the Contraception page.)

Just as Sanger and Hitler could not or would not recognize their own or their race’s inferiority to anything or anyone, Enlightenment and Scientism cannot or will not recognize its own unreasonableness. Ever. It’s supposed to be a purely reason based philosophy, but it betrays pure reason in all of its actions. Having denied Heaven, having adopted and adapted man and pure material as all there is to work with, Enlightenment and Scientism continually sets for itself the task of creating man made perfection in all systems on Earth.

Enlightenment and Scientism are therefore doomed to never be satisfied. Perfection is not of this world, but the next. They don’t know that.

The Population Problem is only a problem when seen through the eyes of Enlightenment and Scientism, and quite unreasonably so. The math and all available empiricism prove the falsehood of the Population Problem Hoax, a purposeful hoax that is consistently taught in all government schools today. I submit that it is quite unreasonable.

All you have to do is look up the land-mass in square miles, and the population, of any nation, and then divide to get the number of people per square mile. Very simple. Do that, and you will see that England has a so-called population problem, but China does not. This is, of course, a purely materialistic and empiricist approach, based on pure human reason. Why would any disciple of Enlightenment and Scientism thinking feel that China has a population problem in need of control, and that England does not?

Proponents of the hoax will produce pictures of the most crowded city scenes to “prove” the world’s overpopulation; scenes of streets congested with throngs of pedestrians, bicycles, camels, donkeys, taxi-cabs, busses and trucks, all loaded with people and the produce required of people, to illustrate the population horrors elsewhere. But they will not show you the vast tracts of unoccupied land in the same nation. People do not come together in cities because they have no place else to go. They go to cities to find commerce, markets, and economic and other opportunities. That’s why cities exist; they are, in general, commerce centers.

The only problem the so called “poor” nations have is a lack of personal freedom problem. The principles Adam Smith explored so long ago are either ignored here or openly opposed as false. Smith said that, whenever a man is free to do so, he will automatically work to improve his own condition, and that substantial numbers of people working to improve their own condition automatically improve the condition of whatever is around them. Each free worker, in his own specialty, will produce more than he needs for himself, in order to improve his own condition. This is the source of the creation of all wealth. Wealth of individuals, wealth of families, and wealth of nations. It is how we became wealthy as a nation.

Men who are not free to improve their own condition by their own means, will not improve it. They will consume wealth rather than create it. They will become mouths to feed rather than valuable human capital for themselves, their families and their nations. Enlightenment and Scientism thinking would resolve all that through benign government; but governments cannot produce wealth, they can only consume it. Only free people generate new wealth. Flawed Enlightenment and Scientism reasoning sees wealth incorrectly as some sort of fixed pie in need of being equally divided and portioned out by benign government. This flawed reasoning does economic harm to every system it touches.

Enlightenment and Scientism thinking is fatally flawed here; as usual it betrays it’s own stated goals of being reasonable; there is nothing reasonable about supporting the clear mathematical falsehood of the so-called population problem.

Let’s look at Freudianism. You can go to the Freudianism page for the details; in a nutshell, Enlightenment and Scientism thinking embrace Freudianism as quite reasonable and even scientific truth. Freud’s unsubstantiated conjectures, just like Darwin’s, are now axioms; they are accepted as givens, and not subject to question. That includes the sub-Freudian “theories” of Jung and Kinsey. Freud’s big idea involved his hoax discovery of how to understand and manipulate the sub-conscious mind.

Question: How do you detect, let alone study, the sub-conscious mind?

Answer: You don’t.

It’s not even possible to examine the conscious mind in any mathematically precise or purely empirical way. Yet the Enlightenment and Scientism insists upon the absolute correctness of Freud’s unproven theories, and still claims to base itself solely on reason. In the same manner, they accept at face value without the slightest skepticism the silly, Gnostic, cross-channeling, spirit-being revelations of Jung, and buy into his psycho-kinetics and other absolute crap. The only people anywhere who buy into the published theories of the child molesting pervert Kinsey are all of TTRSTF from the University of Indiana, leading academics everywhere, the SLIMC and the rest of show-biz, celebrityhood, and all other Enlightenment and Scientism disciples.

I call this the Silly Twittery branch of Enlightenment and Scientism so-called pure reason. This is where we get the absolutely false and clearly unreasonable descriptions of active homosexuality as a normal activity, in absolute defiance of mathematics. Active homosexuality is described as a moral activity, in absolute defiance of every major religious moral standard in existence. Which shows that secularism/atheism seeks to forcibly establish a new and unrepresentative moral norm over all of culture. It even involves demonizing opposition, and calling opponents of open homosexuality homophobic, implying mental illness to all who refuse to bow before the Enlightenment and Scientism.

Enlightened thought would have us believe that active homosexuality is a healthy activity, in absolute defiance of the horrific health risks associated exclusively with it. Scientistic thought would have us believe that active homosexuals practice fidelity, in absolute defiance of statistics. Homosexuality is portrayed as enlightened and natural, which is in absolute defiance of Darwin’s dogmas.

When the holders of Enlightenment and Scientism theories tout themselves as educated and sophisticated they are coming closer to being correct. But that raises some serious questions about modern education, does it not?

Enlightenment and Scientism’s absolute religious intolerance of Judeo-Christianity may be its most reasonable and understandable component.

Again, details on the Freudian contribution to Enlightenment and Scientism can be found in the Homo-Nazi Movement page, the HIV=AIDS=DEATH Hoax page and various writings in the All Articles link page.

Looking at Marxism, we see essentially the same thing. We’ve already lightly addressed the Enlightenment and Scientism “morality” established by the likes of Stalin and Hitler. Go to the link for the fatal flaws in economic theory, touted by disciples to be superior to free market Capitalism. Claiming to base itself on reason, it insists that the Leviathan State can and should produce energy and fuel more effectively than free men in free markets, and that bureaucrats can produce better health care than free men in free markets, and that Government is the best authority to decide what and how much you need, your ability to work, what your work should be and what your work quota should be. This is not reason. This is just plain nuts.

The Enlightenment and Scientism Alternative for Western Man involves the ancient Judeo-Christian moral basis tempering the actions of free men, operating in free markets, under representative government. All of these things are demonized in Enlightenment and Scientism thought, but all of them, quite obviously, have proven themselves to work and to be reasonable.

That there have been, probably are and will be again such things as Robber Barons exploiting free market Capitalism is true. That greed raises its ugly head in free nations just as much as it does in un-free nations is also true. Perfection is not of this world, but of the next. Only Enlightenment and Scientism insist on worldly perfection. Reason knows better. Seeking to ameliorate the wrong and reinforce the right is a more reasonable pursuit than seeking total worldly perfection through some obviously impossible silly utopian pipe dream.

That silly notion is what really drives the Enlightenment and Scientism movement.

The Counter Voltaire Movement. I have been accused of trying to make myself into a sort of mini-Voltaire, but in reverse. The charge is that, like Voltaire, I seek, mostly, to popularize my own writing more than to achieve my pro-Catholic, pro-Judeo-Christian and pro-American goals. Which is to say, an anti-Enlightenment and Scientism goal. I hope that is not true, and never becomes true. While I do seek to popularize my own writing, I pray that I will always have a greater interest in leading others back to critical thinking and back to our common guiding ethos than in any personal popularity.

Like Voltaire, I am no philosopher, and I present no new philosophy of my own; I simply write about issues of contention, and I do it with nowhere near the skill and style of Voltaire. People need to be aware of these issues, and today people get only one slanted view of them. Someone needs to counter that.

Because I talk, in this site, about how you can build your website yourself, the nuts and bolts of how to build a website, and the notion of textual content, like this content you are reading, being done in such a way as to build rank with search engines, that I somehow have less interest in my actual subject matter than I do in building my own website traffic. Let me state, for what it’s worth, that this is not true. While I do consistently build traffic to this site over time, my primary goal remains my primary passion, which is, to give witness to Truth and to strongly oppose Falsehood at every opportunity. The fact that I pursue that passion in a very public forum and that my detractor speaks only in private communications speaks volumes. Some of us speak our minds out loud in the open, and some of us do not. I openly admit to a secondary goal of attracting conservative believers to build their own websites and join in the effort, and if I can profit from some of them doing that, there is no sin in that. You’re not going to see the Truthful side of these issues raised by the SLIMC in the daily news. If you don’t see it on the internet, you won’t see it at all.

Any believing Jew or Christian of any denomination who reads these words and who feels passionately about these issues should consider creating his or her own website. There is no better way to achieve instant publication and possibly move more souls over time; at least not for any layman. Once your traffic visit-count reaches hundreds per day and thousands per month, you will be potentially speaking to more people on a weekly basis than your own Pastor.

Near-future planned pages on the Inquisition, the Crusades and so forth will be done in such a way as to attract even more traffic.

Yes, I seek to increase traffic to this site, and yes, I seek to make a buck in several different ways on this site, but I am no Voltaire. I pray that my major goal in life and everywhere is to continually seek the Truth, find the Way and live the Life.

Here’s hoping that you might please God, and that you might live forever.

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