> In his fifth and final anniversary address as President of the Royal
> Society, Lord May will point out that the core values of the
> Enlightenment lie at the heart of the Society, which was founded 345
> years ago today. These are "free, open, unprejudiced, uninhibited
> questioning and enquiry, individual liberty and separation of church
> and state". However, he will warn that these values are "under
> serious threat from resurgent fundamentalism, West and East."
The implementation of Enlightenment ideas in the French Revolution led
to what could arguably termed genocide. Executing aristocrats got the
publicity, but drowning boatloads of peasants (to save on ammunition)
did much more to depopulate northern France. The Enlightenment wasn't
all bad, but it wasn't all good, either.
The enlightenment is sometimes invoked as the ideal here in the U.S.,
too, in this context. I suspect that some of the "warfare model" bogus
histories of science-faith interaction may be to blame.
-- Dr. David Campbell 425 Scientific Collections Building Department of Biological Sciences Biodiversity and Systematics University of Alabama, Box 870345 Tuscaloosa AL 35487-0345 USAReceived on Wed Nov 30 17:09:36 2005
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