Age of Enlightenment

by the British empire, especially, uh, as sort of their international, um, spy network.

So yeah, I'm not surprised about that, but I honestly don't know a whole lot about that, but I think Protestantism in general, British empire in general, was very adept at using Freemasonry for multiple purposes, including pushing all of the Enlightenment values.

And we've got our Catholic buddy here with us.

I remember when I was a trad cat, the thing that really woke me up to all this was I was at the SSPX Mass, and I remember getting ahold of a little booklet which was Leo XIII's encyclical on Freemasonry.

And he wrote an entry every day about what was coming to Germany and the amazing premonitions that he experienced.

But seismic in another way in the Jews of Europe in having their own version of the Enlightenment, the Haskalah, named for the mind itself, and contributing so mightily on every front from psychiatry to physics to everybody else's Enlightenment too.

Don't think that's going to be forgiven.

My friend Lawrence Krauss, Larry Krauss, I think the greatest living physicist, apart from Stephen Hawking, gave a talk recently, which you can look up.

You can get there through reason.

And all of the Enlightenment is about this.

I think it's fairly well-established thinking in the Western world, at least.

And so if you look at what has happened through history, you know, no, the religions as in the original, the face value definition, the organized religions often do more harm than good.

Lark.

John Locke was a major Enlightenment thinker who's pretty significant in political philosophy, but unfortunately that's not really my area of focus.

As for his epistemology, he argued that the mind is a blank slate when we're born, or a tabula rasa.

All our knowledge is determined by our experience, and we aren't born with any particular ideas or predispositions.

Hume was a well-known party animal and boozehound in his day.

He started drinking Bordeaux in his teenage years, and at 17 years old, he was prescribed a pint of Claret per day to deal with a bout of depression.

Hume's Edinburgh House was a well-known location for dinner parties, among other Enlightenment figures.

One of his major intellectual moves is known as Hume's Fork, and no, that's not referring to his size and enjoyment of food.

Knowledge is a true justified belief.

So justified true belief was a popular theory of knowledge during the Enlightenment, and it basically states that in order to know that some proposition is true, you must not only believe it, but you must also have justification in believing it.

And there's a famous objection to this view of knowledge, which will appear in a later layer.

Science makes philosophy redundant.

It inherits a concern for this from the Greeks, right? The difference is the best of the Greek philosophers and of early Christians and...

I mean, even in the Enlightenment, recognized that the aesthetic and the symbol ought to flow from something substantive, right? And take you

there.

Right.

I am not a scientist, though I am fascinated with the development of language and of languages in many environments, Jason, and I am also a student of religions in different contexts.

The influence in my imagination is sparked by a series of important novels in the 17th and 18th century, Robinson Crusoe, one of them, or the images that the Enlightenment had of individuals left alone to survive in places where so-called Western civilization didn't exist.

In some cases, those were adults, or in others, they were children that had been hidden from adult interaction.

And what the anecdote was about is the learning of a language that they would acquire later on in life.

The Creator has endowed those that have moved from one end of the world escaping to another end of the world to start a new civilization in this kind of Robinson Crusoe island.

where we will begin with the conviction that God is justifying every single act, including the writing of a constitution and the seceding.

All the founding fathers were children or stepchildren of the Enlightenment.

They had learned from Spinoza and other important figures the concept that religion could be a detriment for modern life and that the Bible is a set of myths and jokes and Spinoza gets ostracized because of that view.

I'm reminded of the Jacobins of France who desecrate Notre Dame and rename it as the Temple of Reason.

Do you think— that the Enlightenment had something like a poison pill in secularism, because I know you've talked about sort of muscular Christianity, and I struggle to understand how to see a path forward that preserves the goodness of modernity, but doesn't allow it to basically destroy itself.

absent Christianity.

I can't even really articulate it.

I agree.

You know, I don't even have much to comment.

I agree with you, but you mentioned something about the Enlightenment, and my belief is, okay, the Enlightenment is not what we think it is, because that's part of the lie.

Again, the way we're taught about history, it's all sequential, and there's this movement, and it's one long story about how Arch ages, Christianity, and then it slowly becomes enlightened and smart until you have what you have today.