The Enlightenment
The enlightenment, The culture of criticism...tolerance over prejudice, innovation over stasis, the rights of the minority over the enthusiasms of the majority, and the moral autonomy of the individual over the revealed claims of religious authority. (p.xii)Reclaiming the Enlightenment, Stephen Eric BronnerDimming of the enlightenmentAuschwitz, the gulag and the killing fields are not examples of what happens when people become too critical of unjustified beliefs; to the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of not thinking critically enough about specific secular ideologies. Needless to say, a rational argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem that the atheist exposes is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every religion has more than its fair share. There is no society in recorded history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable.
Sam Harris