Enlightenment help please?

Question

Can you explain like 2 ways that the philosophers of the whole Enlightenment period challenged religious and governmental authority during the 18th century please?

Answer 1

First religion.  Religion has been tied up with politics forever, I mean since prehistoric times.  Leaders of nations or states or even cities have always wanted to have a holy man to endorse them.  When the king appears on the balcony to make a speech, he always wants a holy man standing beside him to assure the people that this king was chosen for you by God, and he rules by God's will, and so therefore to oppose the king is to oppose God.  When the king wants to get into a war, the holy man tells people that this war is God's will.  God wants us to invade the neighboring kingdom, kill all their soldiers, steal all their resources, etc. etc.

This has been called 'the divine right of kings'.  And it was the standard mode of thought until the Enlightenment. From ancient times, Greece and Rome and Babylon and Persia, right up through the time of the Holy Roman Empire.  It wasn't until the Enlightenment that this idea was challenged.  (And, astonishingly, I have had several Christians tell me that God deliberately got involved in Florida in 2000 to pick GW Bush as our president.  So it shows you how hard an idea like this dies!  It's just a natural thing for people to believe!)

Another thing.  Before the Enlightenment, kings and political leaders were considered to 'own' the country.  The people worked for them.  They could make laws, decide who pays what in taxes, draft young men into the army, etc., all on their own authority, and to disagree with the king was unpatriotic and subversive.  It was during the Enlightenment that the idea came about that government works for people rather than the other way around.  People are born free, and they voluntarily give up a little of their freedom for social order.  The government is formed by the people and is an expression of the will of the people.  And if it no longer serves the people's needs, then the people have the right and also the -duty- to change that government.

Answer 2

The Enlightenment occupies a central role in the justification for the movement known as modernism. The neo-classicizing trend in modernism came to see itself as a period of rationality which overturned established traditions, analogously to the Encyclopaediasts and other Enlightenment philosophers. A variety of 20th century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, traced their intellectual heritage back to the Enlightenment, and away from the purported emotionalism of the 19th century. Geometric order, rigor and reductionism were seen as Enlightenment virtues. The modern movement points to reductionism and rationality as crucial aspects of Enlightenment thinking, of which it is the heir, as opposed to irrationality and emotionalism. In this view, the Enlightenment represents the basis for modern ideas of liberalism against superstition and intolerance. Influential philosophers who have held this view include Jürgen Habermas and Isaiah Berlin.

This view asserts that the Enlightenment was the point when Europe broke through what historian Peter g*y calls "the sacred circle," whose dogma had circumscribed thinking. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy and reason as primary values of society. This view argues that the establishment of a contractual basis of rights would lead to the market mechanism and capitalism, the scientific method, religious tolerance, and the organization of states into self-governing republics through democratic means. In this view, the tendency of the philosophes in particular to apply rationality to every problem is considered the essential change. From this point on, thinkers and writers were held to be free to pursue the truth in whatever form, without the threat of sanction for violating established ideas.