PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTARY ON THESE WORDS OF THE GOSPEL, LUKE 14:23, "COMPEL THEM TO COME IN, THAT MY HOUSE MAY BE FULL" (P/B)

Παρουσίαση

The topics of church and state, religious toleration, the legal enforcement of religious practices, and religiously motivated violence on the part of individuals, have once again become burning issues. Pierre Bayle' s "Philosophical Commentary" was a major attempt to deal with very similar problems three centuries ago. His argument is that if the orthodox have the right and duty to persecute, then every sect will persecute since every sect considers itself orthodox. The result will be mutual slaughter, something God cannot have intended. Bayle has often been seen as a skeptic who blazed a philosophical path that Denis Diderot, David Hume, and other Enlightenment thinkers would follow. But his was a philosophical skepticism that did not exclude the possibility of religious faith, and Bayle himself was a Calvinist Christian. (. . .) (ΑΠΟ ΤΗΝ ΠΑΡΟΥΣΙΑΣΗ ΣΤΟ ΟΠΙΣΘΟΦΥΛΛΟ ΤΟΥ ΒΙΒΛΙΟΥ)