REASON, FEAR OF GOD, and the U.S.A.
According to the Bible, God said ‘LET THERE BE LIGHT’, but for most of the time since, there was anything but light. The Church ruled with an iron fist. Thinking for yourself was heretical, and you had to follow the teachings of the Church, to spend all your efforts to please God, who was to be feared above all else. A natural disaster was called an act of God; a poor harvest was the result of God’s displeasure, and even a thunderstorm was an expression of God’s anger.
The Church taught that God was no kindly father figure, as they do now, but a terrible authority, who was capable of mass extermination of all the world save for Noah and his family, who turned Lot and his wife into pillars of salt, a self-confessed jealous and vengeful God who smote His enemies, who could and would send your soul to hell and eternal damnation if you did not conform to His strict ways. That was not respect, it was rule by sheer terror and fear, and hence for centuries the world lived in a mental darkness, where all were slaves to the clerics, where free thinking was not allowed and punishable by death. For example, the great Galileo wrote a paper in which he suggested that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way round. The Pope ordered that he be arrested by the Inquisition, and he was threatened with torture until he withdrew his ideas.
Thus, the Church is not the strong unchanging bastion of truth and goodness, but a contender for power and riches that rivalled kings and their governments. What are the powerful pieces on a chessboard? Kings and Queens, knights, and bishops, for they wielded as much power and control over the peasants or pawns.
It took King Henry V111 to overthrow the power of the Church. He took the land and the riches way from the Church, which was enough to, start the Church plotting against him and later his daughter Queen Elizabeth 1, ending in the Spanish Armada
Ever since, the Church has been in retreat from science and knowledge, blindly denying the obvious, or subtly changing its views to make them at least superficially acceptable. Who still believes that the sun revolves around the earth, or that thunder is the anger of God as the Church once insisted?? Yet you still see American evangelistic preachers hysterically threatening hell fire, retribution and such to simple uneducated folk, or in backward places like Haiti, where it is mixed with voodoo.
The 18th. Century was the Age of Enlightenment, a time when thinking men began to shed light into a dark unthinking, cowed and fearful world that dared do nothing save worship God…or else.
It started in France, with such men as Voltaire and Rousseau, and spawned the French Revolution. Of course it want wrong and lead to a terrible bloodletting and even more fear than under the Church. Luckily, the Age of Reason transferred to London, where uniquely, there was freedom of speech as existed nowhere else. A network of nearly 600 coffee houses existed, where sober discussion of ideas openly took place day and night. The lunar Society was formed, whose members met once a month on the full moon. They called themselves the lunatics, but others called them luminaries. These luminaries changed the world with their ideas. Men such as Isaac Newton, John Locke, Ebenezer Darwin (grandfather of Charles) made London the centre of the intellectual universe. Voltaire came to live in London, which he declared was a paradise of thought, which was admired and copied throughout Europe.
But if London was the Rome of thought, Edinburgh was the Athens of it, and a Scottish Enlightenment flourished. Adam Smith wrote on economic matters, and his ‘The Wealth of Nations’ is still taught to this day. David Hume wrote about many things, not least matters of freedom and religion. It was his ideas that, through Benjamin Franklin, inspired the ideas contained in the American Declaration of Independence.
It is very strange that in order to become independent of Britain America adopted a document full of British ideas, and that the country that enforces democracy, freedom and liberty on others whether they want it or not, is itself so controlled by the Church, and where freedom of speech is so under threat, liberalism being a dirty word.
