 What we know of the period of European Enlightenment and especially what came before it is already very distorted from the truth. We like to believe that before the time of the Italian Renaissance there was the Dark Age of Europe where all pursuit of knowledge was suppressed by the Catholic Church so that could not threaten the supremacy of the papacy in controlling the population through religious dogma. There is of course a fair bit of truth to this and especially in the later parts of what we call the Dark Age with the Catholic Inquisition and most famously the persecution of Galileo for the publication of his Heliocentric Model saying that the earth revolved around the Sun. We now have a prevailing narrative that science and religion are fundamentally at odds with one another which is incredibly naive and ignorant to the history of both fields. Making such a statement is an extremely quick way to show yourself as nothing more than a reddit tier thinker who enjoys watching atheist youtubers destroy stupid creationists with facts and logic who would never even dare to look in the general direction of an actual theologian. Because they know that what they would find if they did get into a conversation with one is themselves thrown into the deep end with our armbands after priding themselves on being the best swimmer in the shallow end. Apart from the blip of a few hundred years in all of human thought science and religion have been a syncretized field. In the 1200s the middle of this dark ages Saint Thomas Aquinas solidified theology as the aforementioned syncretism of Catholicism with both contemporary and ancient metaphysics, moral philosophy and the natural sciences where his faith was part of his pursuit of knowledge and helped him to make sense of all of his pursuits never clashing with or detracting from them. Take for example Aristotle's ancient theory of the unmoved mover. Everything which is in motion had to begin its motion. A ball on a flat surface does not start rolling unless it is pushed. Everything in the universe is in motion so something must have started this motion. This is used as a justification for the existence of some sort of being outside of our comprehension which got the ball of our universe rolling and far from being contrary to our intuitive understanding of physics it's quite possibly the only explanation for physics as we know it and cannot be argued that it was for thousands of years. This is all said just to highlight the naivety of believing that science is always a pursuit that is at odds with religion and that religion was nothing but a shackle on scientific development for the whole of human existence up until the Renaissance period. Questions of spirituality can never be separated from the workings of the universe. Take for example this eternal question what happens to you after you die? Whether you believe you simply cease to exist your soul moves on to an afterlife or your soul transfers to a new body there is only one constant between them all belief. Faith is a point that everyone who is curious enough to ask these questions arrives at when their system of understanding has reached a point where it has become true in everything they see. If you observe secular science and determine that it explains all you can possibly know about the universe then you have faith in it and from this faith you derive an unwavering belief that you return to a state of non-existence after death as you did before birth. If instead you observe the intricacy of the universe and derive that it simply could not have occurred purely by chance that this has been orchestrated by a prime builder who you will meet after your time on earth then that is your faith which has been reinforced by your belief system. It is in this sense that science and faith are intertwined however secular science can still be pursued providing one extremely important criteria is met which is that you understand what science actually is it is a system which asks questions first and finds answers second science is a means and understanding is its end like many pursuits at the core of human curiosity this itself is a paradox all a new understanding is developed from previous understanding Isaac Newton couldn't have begun to have understood why the apple supposedly landed on his head if he did not understand the distinction between forms of matter that a solid which has a greater mass than air will fall rather than float and yet today we all take Newton's laws and understanding of gravity to be true and this shows the level of naivety in the belief of science as the means of acquiring truth rather than understanding as Newtonian physics is currently undergoing great scrutiny and being questioned so now think of the phrase we haven't been able to stop hearing since early 2020 and even before whenever somebody wanted to talk about climate change follow the science a person who tells you to not question the science as if it is some sort of monolithic conscience guiding us to truth aka god is participating in religious fundamentalism not secular science the question of what truth is has never and will never be a scientific question it is a question of philosophy and religion itself is in many ways philosophy hence if you claim that science derives absolute truth rather than being an evolutionary process of greater understanding you are a religious fanatic Anthony Fauci has been on record several times now saying something to the effect of if you question me then you question science the extraordinarily disgusting fraud being committed here is the implication of what it is that scientists do the scientist job is exactly to endlessly question science the scientific method is an infinite process of looking at what we know and asking if it is in fact correct a person or institution who claims they cannot be questioned is not a person or institution of science but is instead a tyrannical clergy not in the business of increased understanding through questioning but in squashing any thought which undermines their power and influence over the thoughts of society stop me if this sounds familiar to the inquisition of the catholic church the enlightenment was a period where science was correctly recognized as a secular pursuit on the quest to find greater knowledge through questioning our existing knowledge and now this era of enlightenment appears to be dead rather than being secular science has become to be seen as its own end not as a means for a doctor to say I am the unequivocal voice of science and science cannot be questioned is and I say this with no irony or exaggeration the exact same as a pope saying I am the unequivocal voice of God and God cannot be questioned in a frantic pursuit to remove religion from science science has become its own religion it has become plagued with the exact same dogma authority and punishment of heresy which is now called misinformation typified by that time of the dark ages if the abolition of these processes is considered to be the definition of the age of enlightenment and they no longer exist then it is safe to say we have regressed away from that enlightenment and back into a religious fundamentalism that exists only to preserve the supremacy of its institutions over the people that preside under it if you question the word of science which is exactly what science is there for the clergy now wants to make you a second class citizen branded with the mark of heresy for all to see to become a pariah in your own community and to be disowned by society and even your own family classed as impure and to be barred from attending events and going to places restricted only for the pure the righteous the unquestioning believers of the divine council of science with two needle marks to prove it science is in reality amorphous it is something that is not meant to be the same tomorrow as it was yesterday but it has been declared an unmoving perfect divine being from which we must all worship deify never question submit ourselves to its holy wisdom that we can never hope to match which only the clerics can understand as in the past they did because only they spoke latin and most importantly the divine authority it imbues into its bishops who are here to be the shepherd of us poor misguided souls the flock science is now god science is no longer secular our civilization is no longer enlightened it's been pretty obvious that so far i've been primarily addressing that big thing which has swept over the entire world which are not actually allowed to say on youtube or or shall be demonetized due to wrong think but it's spread across all the fear mongering of the modern media and their intelligentsia laptops to question the efficiency of so-called renewable energy is to question science with a capital s or even worse to deny climate science only truth can be denied and once again truth is not a scientific concern these gullible tools of the establishment are stupid and their minds are corrupted but they are not your enemy as everyday Catholics were not the enemy of Galileo his enemy was the inquisition and we have one of our own that is our enemy due to these past events the enlightenment brought about the separation of church and state to prevent this happening again and as science has become its own church our goal now is the separation of the scientific church and state environment and state health and state and much more this new church has many heads which might be cause for pessimism but in actuality it makes the fight much much easier we as libertarians are currently in the perfect position to coalition with disenfranchised conservative policymakers to try and bring about many of these separations as we share these institutions as a common enemy conservatives and libertarians are both equally threatened by the prospect of being excommunicated by this church the us department of homeland security earlier this year tried to class both of us as domestic terrorist threats by having objections to the exercise of government authority which first of all you're goddamn fucking right we do but then replace government with church and you can easily see that it's for the crime of not bowing to their supremacy they are demanding our capitulation to get down on our knees and flay ourselves as penance for our sins against almighty science and his chosen state we are not going to take it and neither our conservatives a motivated minority can always overcome a sedentary majority without even breaking a sweat and the new church and its various orders have been greatly overplaying their hands for a very very long time now and have developed a false sense of security that they can get away with it forever and the peons will just put up with it due to this France is currently on the brink of another revolution and countries all over Europe are standing up in the tens of thousands to say no just because you don't see it in the approved news outlets whose mission is to preserve the regime doesn't mean that it isn't happening the church will never show you its weakness so any weakness you do actually see you can know that in reality it is magnified to a factor of 10 this ecclesiarchy executing the will of the great holy science by any means necessary is on the teetering point and its survival hinges solely on your belief that it can't be overthrown it only takes a fed up minority to drop this belief for the enlightenment to return so the sheer amount of brain dead lackeys on social media who recite their trust the science scripture at you all day long is no reason to stem your motivation at all these drones will sit by and let the world move around them you only have to decide that you're going to be the ones doing the moving and you can achieve quite literally anything including the return of the enlightenment you know it wouldn't be an anglo libertarian video if i didn't put a positive swing on it so there you are take it easy