The enlightenment , is identified with an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries within Europe . A movement that carried some distinctive ideas , engaging a wide array of readers and thinkers . One of these ideas , and a major philosophical side of the enlightenment , was religions , and the relationship with their gods , as well as their influence on the human kind .
Most enlightenment thinkers were hostile to religion , condemning it as an irrational delusion , later circles of irreligious thinkers and writers , especially in the first decades of the 18th century produced works like " Treaties of the three impostors " , in its final issue in 1721 , where they described and identified ; Moses , Christ , and Mohammad as impostors who had deceived their people .
The irreligious enlightenment considered in many instances , that certain nations , had elevated one god above others , thus becoming monotheistic and monotheists , and this monotheism invariably tended to extreme enthusiasm and fanaticism , where in their fanaticism , monotheists were characteristically more brutal and less tolerant than polytheists and atheists .
David Hume strongly believed that all three monotheistic religions advocates and adherents , of elevating their supporters and themselves to the next world above the present one , with a morality of self denial , exactly a major source of most of our ills in our actual modern times . While and according to Spinoza , humans are part of nature , and god and nature are simply different , albeit of the same substance . God therefore exerts no external providential power over nature , nature is always determined in itself .
The religious institutions and hierarchies could be respected , only when they apply , and genuinely accept , learning how to live with the total liberty of the individual conscience , and any strongly held belief . The enlightenment argued and showed through historical facts , that the ancient Babylonians , Egyptians , Greeks and Romans , and more so Chinese , were by far more tolerant than the peoples of all three monotheistic religions throughout their histories , and unfortunately more so in our 20th and 21st century .
The enlightenment's contribution to historical understanding of religion , and to arguments of toleration , is exactly what is missing in our modern Musslem and Jewish thinking , and practises toward others . Some pockets of the same type of behavior exist and is evolving steadily in some Christian societies , all leading to ; "The triumph of barbarism and religion" to borrow Voltaire's words.
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