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The Radical Enlightenment Hated Everything That Was Religion

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REL 2011 Midterm Essay
QUESTION 2 The radical Enlightenment hated everything that was religion. This was a time where scientific naturalism was being applied to every field of inquiry and everything, including religion, was under scrutiny. The philosophers during the Enlightenment each had their reasons for their hostile view of religion. The distaste for religion began when Reimarus wrote “”, which was published for the first time in 1972 and had 1400 pages of content. His book labeled the second coming of Christ a farce, he believed that the disciples stole the body of Christ and fabricated the resurrection. Reimarus accused the disciples of using the idea of Christ coming back as a way to maintain a sense of power. He went as far as…show more content…
Kant’s stance leaned more towards understanding morality. He stated that you cannot go to religion for morality, due to it being the death of morality itself. Moreover, Kant sheds light on the imperfections of the Bible. He viewed the God of the Bible in a different perspective, calling him an arbitrary tyrant. A god that commands his followers to kill, to sacrifice, and one that damns people to hellfire. These statements by Kant led people to think that religion altogether must be eliminated and people should focus more on reason rather than revelation. Schleiermacher and Hagel had a different view of the radical Enlightenment and points made during it. Schleiermacher believed that Kant is undermining reason. He believes Kant is wrong because in his view religion is ethics and the enlightenment has the wrong idea by trying to throw our religion. He understands the concept of god has to be interpreted if we want to keep it. Schleiermacher wants to keep religion, not let it go the way the Enlightenment wants to, he wants to keep Christianity and wants us to rethink Christianity. Hagel as well wants to be the savior of Christianity, he wants to rescue to the content. He sees the Enlightenment as a necessary step in the development of god. Because we are a manifestation of the absolute, that’s what the kingdom of god means, this world and this process, it is the unfolding of the will of god and we are the agents of that process.
Hegel is influenced by
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