Discuss the Power of Enlightenment Ideas, Such as Reason and Natural

Question

Examlex · Accepted Answer

The Answer is Colonists debated how the Enlightenment idea of "natural rights" might influence their actions as colonists under the rule of the British crown. They discussed how far an individual's reason could push them away from established faiths, as they rejected authoritarianism, irrationality, and obscurantism.Some became deists, a faith holding that God had merely set up this world and then allowed humans to develop it as their reason allowed. Famous American Enlightenment thinkers include Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.The ideas associated with the Enlightenment inspired both harmony and conflict with religious leaders, and many of the most consequential American intellectual outpourings from the colonial period are either rejections of or support for the Enlightenment. Cotton Mather, for instance, produced important sermons as he refined a Puritan theology that articulated the centrality of God to an individual's well-being. William Bradford, John Winthrop, and Edward Johnson wrote histories of New England, giving special testament to the sacrifices made to religion by the colonial founders, but also hedging a bit toward the Enlightenment by praising the individual fortitude of those founders. They seemed to be trying to balance the imperatives of reason with those of revelation. And religion animated the poems of Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, and Michael Wigglesworth. The American Enlightenment did not produce many atheists or agnostics, but it did begin a process whereby religious thinkers tried to find a balance between science and religion.The necessity of training ministers, especially in New England, had led to the creation of an educational system, and the Enlightenment ideals of individual progress via human reason prodded the slow democratization of the system over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reflecting this balance between religious and secular ideals, America's first college, Harvard, was founded in 1636, not as an official church school, but under the prevailing Puritan philosophy and with a mission to create a literate ministry. In 1642, Massachusetts passed a law requiring parents to teach all children to read. In 1647, it passed a law requiring towns to maintain a primary school. Although they did so more slowly than New England, the Middle Colonies also launched endeavors in public education.

Discuss the Power of Enlightenment Ideas, Such as Reason and Natural

Definitions: