Not all philosophers (persons making debate) during the Enlightenment were atheists or agnostics. Some were unitarian, some were Christian. I agree with you about how bad Rosseau was. I doubt anyone who actually bothers reading well into the details of the French Revolution can deny the genuine tyranny excercised by France, and the reason behind the term, “Reign of Terror” or the Vanadee massacre.
Either way, you make good company in discussing history, and I look forward to meeting you again.
I enjoy the echange, too. But one of the things that is utterly false in our historical “narrative” is the appropriation by “Enlightenment” historians of people who had nothing to do with the Enlightenment and who explicitly rejected its premises.
As a Christian, Locke would never have agreed to be part of a movement that posited the ultimacy of “Reason” and would have been appalled at being classed with such people. The only reason for “reaching back” for people like Locke to include in the Enlightenment’s “Pantheon” is to give that intellectually and morally bankrupt movement a respectable pedigree. This anachronistic approach to historiography is both deliberate and deceitful.
Consider another example of the same sort of deceitful historiograhy. With the exception of D’Alembert, the Philosophes were coffee house intellectuals; they were the kind of people who would write for a magazine like Harper’s today or write for Broadway. They were NOT apostles of “science”. In fact, they were suspicious of “natural philosophy”, as it was then called, because it had a “Puritan odor” about it.
Modern science truly began with the formation of the Royal Society in London in 1660, and the founders were overwhelmingly Puritan. It was only after “science” gained tremendous prestige in the 19th Century that the heirs of the “Enlightenment” decided to run to the front of the parade so that they could pretend to be leading it. The current false narrative about the alleged the conflict between science and religion was deliberately concocted by two 19th Century authors, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.
The cavalier attitude of the Enlightenment culture toward science can be seen concretely in the political murder of Lavoisier by the “Enlightened”. When a final appeal was made for Lavoisier on the ground that he was a great scientist, the “Enlightened” responded that the Revolution had no need of scientists. Lagrange later said that it took but a moment to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it for 100 years.