"Atheists, Deists, and the Chinese Caused Renaissance/Enlightenment"

Mark Rego Montei Zafar Shar You refer to atheist, Deist, and Chinese influences as the basis of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. You are not alone in making the first two assertions, while the third goes further than more common notions. Atheists normally promote the first two views based on their untenable and ideological stereotyping assumptions that go basically, "Some Christianity has been repressive, therefore no advances can be Christian." In fact, both the Renaissance and Enlightenment involved Christians developing art and ideas, respectively. As human beings experiencing the benefits of Christian historical and social developments, like monastic schools and Universities, Luther´s Reformation freed Christian thinkers for the Enlightenment. Christians like DesCartes and Galileo didn´t emphasize the roles of God and Jesus as they did science, so it became mechanistic and split off. Pascal made a protest at the time, as did John Locke. "Atheism" is basically a derivative position that simply denies its dependence on the efforts of theists, as was the case with Hobbes and Hume, I think. Atheism can´t actually sustain the networks that are its base. Deism is just rationalist theism, and a Christian position dissenting from hypocritical authority, as with Thomas Jefferson. Any Chinese knowledge would have had limited impact for a non-Chinese culture, while Christian monastic-University-based culture used primarily ancient Greek philosophy unleashed by Christian culture and faith in an omnipotent God thru Jesus to organize intellectual insights, and include Muslim scholarship, and so on. "God wants to be worshiped in Spirit and Truth," along with God´s commandments through Jesus to "Love thy neighbor as thyself, etc.."