Societies Distanced from Religious Values
That period in which materialist and evolutionist ideas gained widespread acceptance in European society, and influenced it in distancing itself from religion, is known as the Enlightenment. Surely, those who selected this word (that is those who characterized this change of ideas positively as a move into the light) were the leaders of this deviation. They described the earlier period as the “Dark Age” and blamed religion for it, claiming that Europe became enlightened when it was secularized and held religion at a distance. This biased and false perspective is still today one of the basic propaganda mechanisms of those who oppose religion.
It is true that Medieval Christianity was partially “dark” with superstitions and bigotry and most of these have been cleared in the post-Medieval age. In fact, the Enlightenment did not bring much positive results to the West either. The most important result of the Enlightenment, which occurred in France, was the French Revolution, that turned the country into a sea of blood. For most of the French intellectuals, the Enlightenment meant purging people’s minds of every religious and spiritual value. Nearly all the thinkers who lived in eighteenth-century France shared this view. The French Revolution was built on this idea of Enlightenment that held sway in France; it was one of the modern world’s most barbarous, merciless and savage revolutions. As soon as the Jacobins came to power after the Revolution, the first thing they did was to bring in the guillotine; thousands of people lost their heads just because they were accused of being rich or religious. One of the leaders of the Revolution by the name of Fouché (his nickname