"Most of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment... distanced themselves not only from the claims made in the name of revealed religion and its self-appointed intermediaries; the majority of them also rejected the idea of a deity at all, or rather a deity who, at some remote period of historical time, had made his intentions known to man or took any interest in his affairs or was prepared to intervene on his behalf." (pg. 98)
Revealed religion - Religion as stated in the Bible
Natural religion - Religion that could somehow be intuited from nature.
Civic religion - A state religion based in simple religious/ethical beliefs. Some Enlightenment
thinkers thought civic religion necessary for social control.
Famous Enlightenment Traditional Christians:
Adam Smith (1723 - 1790)
Smith was a lifelong member of the Church of Scotland, but only spoke of
"the great architect of the universe" in his writings. Whether Smith was a Christian
or a Deist has long been debated.
Deism
Famous Enlightenment Deists:
Montesquieu (1689 - 1755)
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1788)
Rousseau switched from Calvinism to Catholicism and back to Calvinism, but he didn't
seem too concerned with the difference. Nonetheless, he fully believed people had souls
and that there was an afterlife. This set him apart from most Deists.
Nontrinitarian Christianity:
Unitarians believe that mainline Christianity does not adhere to strict monotheism but that they do by maintaining that Jesus was a great man and a prophet of God, perhaps even a supernatural being, but not God himself. They believe Jesus did not claim to be God and that his teachings did not suggest the existence of a triune God. Unitarians believe in the moral authority but not necessarily the divinity of Jesus. Their theology is thus opposed to the trinitarian theology of other Christian denominations.
Unitarian Christology can be divided according to whether or not Jesus is believed to have had a pre-human existence. Both forms maintain that God is one being and one "person" and that Jesus is the (or a) Son of God, but generally not God himself.
In the early 19th century, Unitarian Robert Wallace identified three particular classes of Unitarian doctrines in history:
Arianism, which believed in a pre-existence of the Logos, but maintained that Jesus was created and lived as human only;
Socinianism, which denied his original divinity, but agreed that Christ should be worshipped; and
"Strict Unitarianism", which, believing in an "incommunicable divinity of God", denied both the existence of the Holy Spirit and the worship of "the man Christ."
Unitarianism is considered a factor in the decline of classical deism in the 19th century because there were people who increasingly preferred to identify themselves as Unitarians rather than deists.
Conservative Unitarian theology accommodates a wide range of understandings of God.
Radical Unitarian theology further rejects the importance of dogma, liturgy, and anything other than ethics and a gospel of love.
Atheism / materialism
Enlightenment atheists:
Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709 - 1754)
David Hume (1711 - 1776)
Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715 - 1771)
Baron d'Holbach (1723 - 1789)
Thomas Paine (1737 - 1809)
Marquis de Condorcet (1743 - 1794)
Jeremy Bentham (1748 - 1832)
Coterie d'Holbach - Between 1750 and 1780, the immensely wealthy Baron d'Holbach held a saloon at his home in Paris were twelve of a roltating list many of the famous French Enlightenment philosophers, including international guests, met twice a week. Attendees included Denis Diderot, Claude Adrian Helvetius, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Abbe Raynal, Nicolas Antoine Boulanger, Jean Francois de Saint-Lambert, Jean-Francois Marmontel; and, occasionally, Comte de Buffon, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, and Francois Quesnay. Others who attended the salon included Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Abbe Galiani, and Charles Pinot Duclos, David Hume, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestly, Adam Smith, Cesare Beccaria, and Edward Gibbon.
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