The Impact of Enlightenment Philosophies on Historicism and Criticism of Religions - A critical foundational study of the project of global secularism

Abstract

The struggle of religious thought with philosophy and science in the Western European perspective has generated critical positivist philosophies and emancipatory readings; readings that establish a conceptual paradigm based on rationalisation, historicisation, secularisation and humanisation. Materialism, humanism, existentialism, and relativism were founded on the ruins of classical religious thought and represent the first radical features that laid the foundation for critiquing, refuting, and reading religious texts.

The issue of historicity emerges in its manifestations and takes on new philosophical dimensions in the human historical method, and the issue of reading becomes related to the interpretation and understanding of laws and religions in a material, evolutionary, relativistic, and historical manner, away from any unseen or metaphysical reality. Our research leads us to the reality of the historicity of religions as a philosophy that encompasses a rational view of the universe and existence, transcending metaphysics and rebelling against theology, on a platform that places man at the centre of the historical process, with the aim of gradually liberating man through an ideological debate and a cultural revolution that overcomes the inheritance and the old through a realistic philosophy crystallised by history, and paves the way for the launch of the global secularism project.