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Originally Posted by kindlekitten
I think it is a PERFECT example! it got people thinking outside of the narrowly confined religion box. I think if some of that liberalized thinking were applied to Islam right now it would help temper it a LOT!
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After the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755 the danish national poet of the time and ardent lutheran wrote a poem about the earthquake as God's just punishment, referencing to Sodoma and Gomorra etc.
Meanwhile Voltaire took another course. As a response to the earthquake his main character addresses the spiritual leader at the end of one of his poems and says (quoted from the top of my head) something like this:
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I bring you, oh almighty being, every thing you are not: The mistakes, the evilness, the stupidity.
But (says Voltaire as an author comment) he could have added hope.
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Hope for a better life, hope for improvement of ones situation in this life is also something different than religion and God according to Voltaire. God promise us the afterlife. Critical thinking promise us a better life in this life we're living aat the cost of the afterlife.
The point is that it wasn't the reformation that allowed critical thinking, it was secularism.
Edit: found the real thing. It's from the "POEM ON THE LISBON DISASTER; Or an Examination of the Axiom, “All is Well”":
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A caliph once, when his last hour had come,
This prayer addressed to him he reverenced:
“To thee, sole and all-powerful king, I bear
What thou dost lack in thy immensity—
Evil and ignorance, distress and sin.”
He might have added one thing further—hope.
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http://app.libraryofliberty.org/?opt...html&Itemid=27