Hitchcock has written a sensible and commendable book which relates some significant facts about how the Catholic Church created the modern world. Juxtaposed against this reality we have the Moslem cult which invented precious little [except Jihad and fascist reliogisity]; and the 'age of reason'. This not so reasonable age dubbed the 'Enlightenment' was in many ways quite unenlightened. It enshrined non-science such as abiogenesis or alien life as 'scientific'. It rewrote through a travesty of error and malice the 'Middle Ages' and eviscerated Medieval Christian culture, which fed into philosophical-materialist doctrines such as Atheism, Pantheism, Socialism, Marxism and Communism. The Enlightenment is directly responsible for the disaster of the French Revolution, Napoleon, Darwin, 3 World Wars and Atheist regimes [including Hitler's] eradicating 100 million souls. What is Enlightened about this era?

The buffoon answers 'science', as if this genre of inquiry only sprang up in the 17^th century with the Catholic Newton. This ignorance is paraded around as 'enlightened' thinking. Science and technology flourished during the European Middle Ages. As Hitchcock writes, the materialist fantasies of many of the unEnlightened during the 17^th and 18^th centuries led directly to war, camps, death and a zeitgeist of hating the human. Who can obsess about 'morality' when might makes right, you are 'evolved' from mud or worse, and our solar system is just a trash hole on the edge of an infinite and always existing universe? Kill, steal, lie, cheat, and be happy. All was 'blind chance' and power anyways.

Hitchock:

“[theories pertaining to the]...materialistic. Man was no longer above nature but was subject to blind laws. Herbert Spencer’s (d. 1903) application of evolution to social life—“the survival of the fittest”—claimed that nature rewarded amoral self-interest.”

Blind chance processes and the veneration of 'survival of the fittest', given impetus by nature's magical 'natural selection' led to Hitlerism:

“Hitler was born a Catholic but renounced his faith early, partly because his worship of naked power could not be reconciled with Christian morality. (Because of its teachings about love, forgiveness, and humility, Nietzsche had called Christianity a “slave religion”.) Just as Mussolini sought to associate his regime with the pagan Romans, the Nazis invoked the old Norse gods as appropriate deities for a warlike people.”

[note; The fat Tory effete Edward Gibbon, who like his friends, never worked, never invented, never created and never experimented with anything; blamed Christian pacifism for the Fall of Rome. A rather moronic claim. So much for the 'science' of history.]

Hitlerism fed off of Social Darwinism and used 'science' to prove that Evolution was true, that Blacks, Indians and Aboriginals were related to apes; and that Jews were an inferior race with sub-human characteristics [greedy, shifty, thirsty for blood, carnivorous etc].

“Social Darwinism” (the “survival of the fittest”) clashed with the equally harsh Marxist doctrine of inevitable class conflict and the necessary use of force.”

[note; Hitlerism and Marxism shared much in common, with National Socialism competing with the Marxists in the same political space for support. Where they differed was in the Marxist obsession with class, and the Nazis with evolutionary-race perfection. Much of their dogmas on how to govern and change society were similar.]

“Nazism’s fanatical anti-Jewish campaign was based on a theory of racial purity partly derived from the Darwinian idea of the “survival of the fittest”—the strongest people, who were presumed to be those of northern Europe, were destined to rule their inferiors and had to protect themselves from contamination by lesser races.”

If you reduce life to materialist blind chance with mud by luck, becoming a mechanic, fully functional with 100 trillion cells, a complexity of organs and software, plus a moral consciousness, then anything goes. You can 'revolt' against 'superstition' and 'dogma', against the fetters of the Church; and install Robespierre or some autocratic fascist who will 'remake' society into the utopian ideal replete with 'supermen' and communal 'greatness'. Death, misery and stupidity quickly follow. An era of Enlightenment.