The Enlightenments

Enlightenment practitioners were called “schoolmen”, or “scholastics”. In the 1500s-1700s, scholastics insisted upon pairing logic and faith. One debating tool they used were examples of successful foreign cultures. These were used to question the underpinnings of the Catholic faith. Cannibalism in Brazil was one such example.

Galileo paired logic and observation in 1632 when he challenged the premise that the sun revolved around the earth. The Church succeeded in shutting Galileo up, but his movement became more firmly founded.

One modern equivalent of the 1500s Catholic Church is multiculturalism, or more properly defined, The Nurturing Age ©. Scholastics who openly question the premise that ‘all men are created equal’ are fired from their jobs and silenced. James D. Watson is a recent example of this.

The Nurturing Age will end with our national government’s credit rating. The future is hard to predict. But in America-2008, logic and resources are pretty closely aligned, suggesting the coming of a new enlightenment.

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/enlightenment.html