Several years ago I suggested to my daughter, who was in High School and reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet, that perhaps she should speculate on whether Claudius was actually the bad guy in the play. Did Claudius interpret Hamlet’s activities (especially the play-with-the-play) as evidence that his crime was known or perhaps that Hamlet was planning to kill the new king, Claudius himself? Should we trust the ghost on the parapets?
As I said, it was speculation and should have resulted in a lot of careful reading of the play looking for clues and interpretations to support this alternate hypothesis. When I was at university it was made clear to me that in the humanities, having the right answer was less important than clearly representing the supporting evidence.
I actually paused to read one of the numerous articles exposing the incompetence and corruption of the Drumph administration. I usually avoid the effort since ninety percent of them are just eloquent and thorough analyses of the obvious: Drumph is a crook.
If daring to know how nature worked was one of the impulses of the Enlightenment, another was disgust with centuries of religious violence. Superstition was bad enough. War was worse. The thinkers of the Enlightenment noticed how religions always disagreed with each other. Each believed it possessed the truth revealed by God and the others were wrong. And when it got control of a country it tried to make everyone march to its drumbeat. That was bad enough. It was worse if there were just two religions in a country competing against each other. They would be at each other’s throats all the time, as they had been in Europe since the Reformation. But if there were thirty religions they all seemed to live in peace!