Intro to the Enlightenment

The enlightenment is kind of a crazy period in time when you think about it.  The primary belief system in the colonies (Puritanism) began to be challenged.  This is specifically shown in those in the field of science and philosophy.  They began to say things like: "There is a creator, but all he did was create things to have a certain order and then the rest of what happens is left up to us.  He's not actually intimately involved in our lives."  That was insane at the time!  Think about it, everything up to that point said that God was controlling everything intimately and we really had no control of what happened.  Now, they still did not see this as heresy, but the churches and those who saw themselves as puritans saw this as wrong.  So most of the writings we will probably encounter in this period are dealing with this new "Deist" idea and what this new viewpoint believes.  We will also eventually encounter political documents because the second half of the enlightenment dealt with the formation of the United States of America.