To what extent does the Enlightenment owe it's basic philosophy to Christian ideology? Have the concepts of Secularism, Separation of Church/Creed and State, and Constitutional Republics arisen in non-Christian civilizations?

I must interject that the Chinese Republic was directly inspired by European and American Republics, which stem from Enlightenment ideas which in my opinion emerged as a response to Christianity and did not arise on the basis of Chinese philosophy. My understanding was that.

Bear in mind that Sun Yat-sen actually converted to Christianity, so it wouldn't surprise me if Christian principles were an influence on his political views.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Yat-sen#Christian_baptism

The Communist regime that replaced the Republic of China was quite clearly based in European socialism and made an effort to eradicate elements of the Chinese identity that contradicted it's agenda. Like many societies the Chinese Emperor's divinity or association with divinity (Like the Tsar of Russia, the Ottoman Sultan who was also a Caliph, The Byzantine Emperors etc) made the separation of Creed and Government impossible.

Back to the first part of the question I think that the Enlightenment could not have arisen in a non-Christian society. My main point of comparison is the only other codified religious-political ideology, Islam. There are many different approaches of course and China did have elements of state religion, but it wasn't really analogous to Christianity or Islam...less totalitarian essentially.

The main point I raise is Christianity actually does leave room for other systems and values. It is an extremely self-contradictory ideology that at times is very liberal and at other times is completely totalitarian. It recognizes that political authority can be separate from divine authority, and while this principle gets contradicted at many points in the bible it is from this contradiction that Enlightenment philosophers were able to justify secularism for instance. Islam on the other hand leaves no room for a political authority that is separate from a religious authority, and it has fewer obvious contradictions than Christianity.

The closest elements of a Republic that one can find within Islamic ideologies is the idea the acknowledgment that clerics and learned religious scholars should engage in discussions and the Caliph should heed those points of view. This lead to institutions of governance that are somewhat similar to parliaments, but parliaments composed of appointees rather than representatives. However I do not know if voting was ever a feature of political organizations in the Islamic world.

Certainly there could not have been a philosopher in an Islamic country who, like John Locke, would have been able to justify democratic government, individual rights and free will, and separation of church and state within the confines of the Islamic religion and using passages of the Quran to justify his point of view which is why secularism is an alien concept in these countries. The Quran simply does not offer the necessary contradictions that philosophers were able to exploit to justify what has come to be the modern 'free' society.

If the Bible were written more clearly and less self-contradictory I imagine there might never have been an Enlightenment.

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