Neo-Enlightenment

Un excellent article à l'humour discret, qui a donné son nom à l'une des catégories de ce blog, regroupant toutes mes vociférations athéistes, attaques anti-cléricales et autres blasphèmes.

Sunday Book Review
The Political and the Divine
By REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN
Published: September 16, 2007

Some of us have been taking the European Enlightenment a little bit for granted. We've assumed that, just as natural philosophers like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler ultimately prevailed in overturning the geocentric model of Ptolemaic cosmology, so, too, moral philosophers like Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke ultimately prevailed in removing ideas of divine revelation and redemption from politics. Progress in both spheres, the scientific and the political, was not only analogous and linked, but also, in some sense, inevitable, at least once rigorous standards of clear thinking were adopted. Let people freely and rationally pursue physics, and eventually they'd draw the conclusion that the Earth moves. Let people freely and rationally think about how best to organize human society, with a view toward diminishing turmoil and augmenting the realization of individual potential, and eventually they'd separate church and state. We've assumed the matter has been thankfully settled, at least in the Western intellectual tradition. No wonder, then, that recent years have brought a spate of incredulous neo-Enlightenment books along the lines of Christopher Hitchens's "God Is Not Great" all of them barely able to contain their dismay that they even have to be arguing what it is they are arguing...