Falling For The WSJ BullHockey

Someone in blog-land fell for the WSJ's bull-hockey "history of the West."

....because of The Enlightenment, that 18th Century awakening led by thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, Jefferson, Mozart and Haydn. --WSJ flapdoodle

Our ancestors replaced dogma, tradition, and authority with reason, debate and institutions of truth seeking. They replaced superstition and magic with science. They shifted their values from the glory of the tribe, nation, race, class or faith toward universal human flourishing....

Uhmmnnnhhh....nope.  Actual study of REAL Western history finds that "the Enlightenment" was constructed on the foundation laid by the Catholic church's intellectuals.  You can look it up in a book:  "Bearing False Witness" written by Rodney Stark, who is NOT a Catholic.

And by the way:  following Voltaire and Locke came such luminaries as Marx and Engels (actually, they are distantly-related followers of Luther.)  It is a fallacy to aver that "reason" replaced dogma:  in fact, reason and dogma are identical.

But that's hard for folks in Madistan to understand, I suppose.  Maybe instead of reading the WSJ's Gospel, they could try Catholicism--which, as GKC said, "....has been found difficult and never tried."