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Secularism and the limits of progress? - The Freethinker freethinker.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from freethinker.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
How Three Media Revolutions Transformed the History of Atheism freethinker.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from freethinker.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Science teaching pioneered in Hampshire on back of failed dream dailyecho.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailyecho.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The ubiquity of the word secularism (it is mentioned in more than 75 of the world s constitutions as an ideal the State promotes, or an organising principle that it affirms), and the passionate discussions it generates throughout the world, sometimes distracts us from the fact that its origins are relatively recent. It was only after the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries; after the bloody inter-denominational conflicts in Europe, or the clashes between ecclesiastical and temporal authorities, which eventually led to the sovereignty of the State (occurring between the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815); after Jefferson s famous wall of separation between Church and State , and Voltaire s privatisation of religion found a welcoming environment in the American and French revolutions in the late 18th century, did the idea of secularism become well entrenched in European literary and political consciousness. The En ....