Enlightened Chain, pg. 17
worldviews. Military opportunism would have led to multiple attacks against either competitor.
The only thing that saved Judaism among Christendom was its undeniable connection through the Torah of Judaism as the basis of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Even this did little to protect Jews from periodic persecution at the hands of their “Christian brethren”. While Muslims were sometimes more tolerant of Jewish communities in their midst - viewing them as “people of the book” who could basically buy their religious freedom by paying additional taxes - it is also true that Muslim societies also periodically “purged” themselves of the Jews in their midst.
I am not so familiar with the leaders of the Reformed Judaism movement, or at all with those in the Muslim and Hindu religions. However, there were decidedly pro-Enlightenment Christian denominations that developed and have thrived. John Wesley, for example, in England created the Methodist Church through his decision to methodically apply reason to the process of worship. The Unitarian-Universalist Church was birthed by the Enlightenment as an attempt to reconcile the unreasonable teachings of a Triune God - the Holy Trinity - with a religious environment that could be logically defended.
This thread of thought was strongly persistent in the American Deist movement. The Jefferson Bible was Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to use his intellect and powers of reason to remove the stain of superstition from his faith. Tom Paine specifically wrote “Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion” as a defense of this sort of activity and saw the attempt to reconcile faith with science as a natural outgrowth of an Enlightened personality. Paine, in particular, drew large parallels between all
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The only thing that saved Judaism among Christendom was its undeniable connection through the Torah of Judaism as the basis of the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. Even this did little to protect Jews from periodic persecution at the hands of their “Christian brethren”. While Muslims were sometimes more tolerant of Jewish communities in their midst - viewing them as “people of the book” who could basically buy their religious freedom by paying additional taxes - it is also true that Muslim societies also periodically “purged” themselves of the Jews in their midst.
I am not so familiar with the leaders of the Reformed Judaism movement, or at all with those in the Muslim and Hindu religions. However, there were decidedly pro-Enlightenment Christian denominations that developed and have thrived. John Wesley, for example, in England created the Methodist Church through his decision to methodically apply reason to the process of worship. The Unitarian-Universalist Church was birthed by the Enlightenment as an attempt to reconcile the unreasonable teachings of a Triune God - the Holy Trinity - with a religious environment that could be logically defended.
This thread of thought was strongly persistent in the American Deist movement. The Jefferson Bible was Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to use his intellect and powers of reason to remove the stain of superstition from his faith. Tom Paine specifically wrote “Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion” as a defense of this sort of activity and saw the attempt to reconcile faith with science as a natural outgrowth of an Enlightened personality. Paine, in particular, drew large parallels between all
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