Chris’s Reviews > The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 > Status Update

Insight is really more important than exact scientific knowledge.

Morality found the upper class cynical and sophisticated, the lower classes brutalised and debauched, but from the middle classes they received a ready response.

... faith might be a delusion but was still a valuable instrument of social control, and anything that kept the masses quiet was too useful to be discarded.

... extreme rationalism leads to complete skepticism.