"Kant rejects any kind of reasoning outside of experience"

That's the first time I've ever heard of anyone who believes this about Kant. Usually, Kantians hold the exact opposite position about what Kant believed.

To leap from a hypothesized ultimate cause to the perfect being of classical theism, you need an a priori argument—one that establishes the necessary existence of that being.

Yes

In other words, you need the ontological argument (or some variation thereof).

Not unless you're using the term "a variation of the ontological argument" to refer to a priori arguments that, to a reasonable person, seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the ontological argument. Neither the article nor Kant argue for this - it's just asserted.

[Omitted: my other hundred issues with this dreck of an article]

Only if you buy into his dualism and definitions. Granted the Abrahamics have to buy into dualism, but not all theists do.

Kant rejects any kind of reasoning outside of experience, not just theistic reasoning. His goal was not to promote atheism or get people to reject the idea of God. God is a necessity of his philosophy.

It is sometimes the case that a historical thinker either (1) doesn’t take their argument far enough, or (2) unintentionally works against their stated purposes. For Kant, we can reject his invocation of faith, but his arguments against the traditional, rational proofs of God’s existence are brilliant and remain relevant. 

This is addressed in the article. Kant attacks all arguments for the existence of God in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant does not believe in rational theology, or the ability for the mind to transcend its own experience to prove God’s existence. In this, Kant was successful. 

Kant made room for faith, on moral grounds, but we need not follow him in this regard. But the fact that his moral philosophy envisioned a God quite different from the God of organized religion does not invalidate his critiques of the traditional arguments for God’s existence. 

Kant showed us how to reject God on rational grounds. We can go one step further and reject the moral need for God. But Kant is still, in my opinion, historically important and valuable for the atheist/humanist cause.

I disagree. His greatest weakness in my estimation is his dualism. He fundamentally sees reality as a dichotomy. He frames his dualism as distinct from Descartes by claiming it’s a dualism between what we experience vs what really is, as opposed to between mind and matter, but i find the two dualisms functionally synonymous.

Of course his idea of God is also dualistic, and that makes it a weak argument, but arguments for God are not necessarily dualistic or weak. Take Spinoza for example.

I agree, and his arguments for theism were his greatest vulnerability and weakness among the philosoph.

I don’t buy his argument either, but framing him as some founding father of atheism is just disingenuous.

Which is funny because he couldn’t hold his own against Diderot and the secularists!!!

Kant had an argument for God, one based on morality instead of ontology.

Kant was a theist, and argued for theism.

I kinda like this guy, hoping he comes up with new stuff soon

Yes, its fascinating how religion impacts culture. Same with Bali Hindus and Indian Hindus.

Because we belong to same family of christianity, ie oriental orthodoxy. Indian orthodox, syrian orthodox, Ethiopian orthodox, Eritrean orthodox, armenian orthodox and coptic orthodox all come under this branch

Interesting, Hume assessed with good logic that to accept testimony in blind faith (pardon the pun) isn't realistic. Especially third party, non identifiable sources.

The fact that the Church forced scientists to publicly say that the Earth was the center of the universe while acknowledging the math supported otherwise in private tells a lot about the human condition known as religion.

Thanks! And Yes, serendipity can be really scarce!

I’ve been thinking about this too… the fact that Algorithms have narrowed down the possibility of encountering variety of thoughts and events. We have been completely cut off from Chaos and randomness, which is the wellspring of creativity. Your idea seems cool.

Ignorance being mankind's true original sin

I'm not sure whether this is true, tbh.

Any ideology or system that attempts to impose its worldview by force, or destroy the rights of the individual is antithetical to everything the secular Enlightenment represents.

I agree with this.

Ahh, so is this then, this so-called "cat shaming" that I've been hearing the young folks talk about so much as of late?

It is absolutely under attack, dangerously so.

I am very skeptical of Rand for various reasons, and I think while her argument about morality seem at firs coherent, she deliberately rejects the actual principles and rights I am advocating and there basis as well, and her views of economics are horrifically flawed.

Also, admittedly, I am advocating human rights and why they should be championed an respected. But as to the "When you argue that these rights are necessary because they, and only they, allow society to prosper, you are already providing a reason why these rights ought to be accepted. If someone comes along and provides a new set of rules that allows society to prosper, perhaps even more, then your argument would fail."

I agree with you, under those circumstances my argument would fail. But I digress, you cannot engineer a system where human beings permanently thrive under subjugation because suppressing reason and agency contradicts the physical and mental mechanics of human existence and nature itself. Just as you cannot design a biological organism to thrive while continuously starving its cells of oxygen, you cannot construct a social system that "succeeds" by crushing the individual’s power to reason and create and the freedoms that enable it to reach its maximum potential. The collapse isn't a moral failure, it's a thermodynamic and structural impossibility for the human beings. That being said, we are talking about basic justice and equal opportunity and things that are fundamental, that can exist under a huge variety of different legal and social and political structures to varying degrees, and in the west and the US especially, these things are less and less of an actual lived reality. And yes, human society will always evolve and morals and positions change based on the factors of change and the unknown.

Claiming that calling miracles violations of natural law is weak misses Spinoza’s and Hume’s actual point. It is not an arbitrary semantic dismissal, it is an epistemological necessity. By definition, a "natural law" describes a universal, invariant regularity observed through cumulative empirical reality. To say a miracle occurred is to say that existence temporarily suspended its own causal matrix. As Spinoza argued, because nature is uniform, infinite, and bound by absolute necessity, a "violation" of natural law implies that nature contradicts itself or that God acts against his own immutable essence, both of which are logically impossible. A miracle isn't just an unproven event, it is a conceptual incoherence.

As to the human rights argument, it isn't moralizing or divine retribution, it is cause and effect physics applied to sociology. Just as dropping a heavy object in gravity yields a predictable physical result, stripping away human rights and freedom of conscience, individual agency etc. yields predictable systemic friction, brain drain, corruption, violent rebellion, and economic decay. It is a descriptive assessment of institutional mechanics, not a prescriptive moral threat. Tyranny fails because it fights human nature which Spinoza defines as the drive to persevere and expand capacity, creating an unsustainable internal contradiction. History and empirical observation show that while autocratic or state directed systems can generate short term efficiency or material output, they invariably calcify because they lack the mechanisms for self correction. Without freedom of thought, free inquiry, and institutional checks on power, innovation chokes, and the system becomes entirely dependent on the whims of whoever holds the monopoly.

Wasn't there a Medival forrunner? You are entirely right. The concept has deep medieval roots.

As to Priesterbetrugstheorie, Thinkers like Hobbes and Spinoza understood religion as a natural psychological outgrowth of human fear, ignorance of natural causes, and the projection of human agency onto nature, anthropomorphism. What clever rulers and elites did was not invent religious sentiment from a vacuum, but systematically co opt and institutionalize and weaponize pre existing human anxieties about death and the unknown, turning a natural psychological vulnerability into a structural monopoly on political obedience. The larger point is that when people are not skeptical of authority and transfer individual moral authority and legitimacy to religion or religious leaders, those leaders inevitably use that for power. Jefferson more articulately argued this very position,

“History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.”

And yes, Rousseau did famously point to the invention of private property as the root of civil inequality in his Discourse on Inequality. However, Rousseau was not an architect of the Secular Enlightenment, but was a deeply anti rationalist and authoritarian figure whose ideas fundamentally conflicted with true secular, democratic principles. Rousseau rejected the universal reason, materialism, and institutional skepticism of Spinozist radicalism, opting instead for a romanticized, emotional collectivism anchored in civil religion, general will absolutism, and moral coercion. Rather than championing individual liberty and representative republicanism, Rousseau’s philosophy paved the way for ideological intolerance and provided the unique intellectual justification for the Jacobin Terror under Robespierre, in which the actual republicans were executed, positioning him as a precursor to modern authoritarian populism rather than human emancipation.

that miracles are violations of natural law and thus impossible,

This is a weak argument, honestly.

Violating them triggers predictable systemic decline, instability, economic stagnation, intellectual decay, and social collapse

That may be true but sounds a bit like "follow my codex or else you will be misery". In this case, just not as a punishment from God but from more mundane laws of social coordination.
Yet, this does not rule out that other sets of rules exist that gouvern socienties well, let them prosper and increase their welfare.

The Treatise of the Three Imposters, originally titled Traité sur les trois imposteurs or La Vie et l'Esprit de Spinosa.

Wasn't there a Medival forrunner?

arguing that religion was a political tool used by rulers to tyrannize the people through superstition and fear.

Sounds like the usual "Priesterbetrugstheorie" (there seem to be no English translation, means something like "Priest Fraud Theory").

In my opinion, the actual history of religion or our current knowledge of it, let this seem a bit unlikely. We see examples of religious behaviour in nearly any human society; it we consider this caused by Fraud, we would need to assume the same fraud happend at different places and times. However, we see the main religion as a justification of power in different places of the world.

not the abolition of property.

Rousseau?

Anyway, there are a lot more texts, and people like Mathew Tindal who was a genuine Deist, were also highly influential. Its not that the Secular Enlightenment purely advocated "atheism" or anything like that, they recognized the role religious institutions and superstition and Ignorance played towards the oppression and detriment of human beings. Ignorance being mankind's true original sin. But what was important and still is, is the Freedom of thought and conscience, and human rights, that are the great enablers of the human race. Any ideology or system that attempts to impose its worldview by force, or destroy the rights of the individual is antithetical to everything the secular Enlightenment represents.

When learning about this stuff, I was struck by how much of the mainstream historiography in America today especially, surrounding things like the French revolution, comes directly from Marxist historians and is wrong. It seems to me like they deliberately papered over and obscured and rewrote historical reality to try to obscure the one Greatest Movement in human history that actually was a revolution for human emancipation and egalitarianism, that attempted to actually Libertate humanity and became the foundations of western civilization. The commies don't want people to know or understand, that the west was the path to happiness, and so much of what is the basis of our freedoms, and republican principles is obscured today.

This is not conspiracy, its a fact, For decades, academic historiography, particularly through the lens of mid 20th century Marxist historians like Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul, framed the French Revolution primarily through a rigid class struggle model, interpreting it as a bourgeois capitalist uprising that paved the way for industrial exploitation, while downplaying or delegitimizing its core republican, philosophical, and individual rights foundations. In doing so, it reframed the core achievements of the Secular Enlightenment, such as freedom of thought, conscience, and representative self governance as mere ideological structures or tools of bourgeois oppression, thereby obscuring the true character of the revolution as a monumental movement for human emancipation and rights. But its about more then that. How many people today understand the very real basis of republicanism and human rights, and Liberty. That obscurity is the greatest weapon, because those principles and ideas are more powerful then any others, they literally were the basis of global revolutions during the expanding blaze, from which western civilization emerged. Now people think of secularism as communism, and Americanism as religion, when the real principles and values far supersede any particular belief system and hold inherent value and meaning to all people.

Anyway learning about the secular Enlightenment radicalized me against communism and socialism, and its largely why I became who I am today and want America and the west to actually remember the values that made us Free and Great. When the foundational principles of liberty, individual rights, and republicanism are obscured or mischaracterized, the public loses its defense against tyranny. Other dangerous ideologies become prevalent, offering cheap explanations. Equating genuine secularism with totalitarian ideologies like communism or reducing the American experiment to dogmatic nationalism completely flips reality on its head, stripping away the universal, rational framework that made self governance possible in the first place, and united so many peoples and cultures under a common cause.

Idk, for me the deeper meaning from Spinoza is the significance of attributing God synonymous with Nature or existence itself, his "God" being simply the infinite, uncaused or self causing, material and conceptual universe itself (substance), operating entirely through immutable, physical and mathematical laws. Whether human beings currently understand a phenomenon or whether it remains an unknown natural force is entirely inconsequential to reality itself. what is simply is, governed by its own immanent laws, meaning existing entirely within, operating from the inside, and bound to the material fabric of the universe itself.

Everything that happens occurs through absolute causal necessity. Human beings are just finite modes of this infinite substance, bound by the same physical laws as a falling stone or a growing plant. In the Tractatus, Spinoza subjects the Bible to historical critical analysis, demonstrating that scripture was written by ordinary humans in specific historical contexts, that miracles are violations of natural law and thus impossible, and that prophecy is merely the product of a vivid imagination rather than supernatural revelation. Religion's sole value, in his view, is social conformity and obedience and moral simplicity for the masses, not metaphysical truth. And yet understanding human existence and nature itself is the basis of understanding what conditions are necessary for human happiness and progress, and what kinds of gov etc. are best suited towards that end. Which led Spinoza directly to representative government and inherent inalienable natural rights, which when violated have the most negative real world and serious implications for human beings. Rights are not abstract moral gifts, they are the baseline structural conditions required for human beings to function without self-destruction. Violating them triggers predictable systemic decline, instability, economic stagnation, intellectual decay, and social collapse, proving that tyranny is a practical failure before it is ever a moral one.

The most prominent, widely circulated, and fiercely denounced piece of clandestine literature from the Radical Enlightenment was The Treatise of the Three Imposters, originally titled Traité sur les trois imposteurs or La Vie et l'Esprit de Spinosa.

Referred to by contemporaries as "The Atheist's Bible," it systematically attacked the foundations of organized religion identifying Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad as political tricksters, impostors, who fabricated divine authority, miracles, and revelation to manipulate the credulous masses for power, arguing that religion was a political tool used by rulers to tyrannize the people through superstition and fear.

Alongside The Treatise of the Three Imposters, several other foundational texts circulated through the underground manuscript network, such as The Spirit of Spinoza ,"L'Esprit de Spinoza" Originally compiled in the late 17th century, this text served as an early, direct synthesis and popularization of Spinoza’s metaphysics. It explicitly argued against the immortality of the soul, discarded divine providence, and asserted that the universe is entirely material, governed by natural necessity rather than divine will. The section titled L'Esprit is a compilation of radical philosophical arguments drawing from Spinoza, Hobbes, and Vanini,  asserting that religion is a political fraud.

"Le Testament de Jean Meslier" Written secretly by a humble French Catholic priest named Jean Meslier, who left the manuscript behind upon his death in 1729, this massive text was a fiery, unvarnished denunciation of religion. Meslier called all religions "human inventions" designed to prop up tyrants and exploit the poor, declaring that kings and priests were the twin banes of humanity. It is widely considered the first fully articulated system of explicit, militant atheism and materialism in modern European history. The Testament is a call for social revolution. Meslier argued that kings and priests were partners in oppression. He famously expressed a wish that "all the great men in the world and all the nobility could be hanged and strangled with the guts of the priests," a sentiment later adapted by Denis Diderot. While Diderot admired Meslier’s atheism and anti clericalism which was shared by many among the Secular Enlightenment, they explicitly rejected his economic communism.

Its also important that while such a text was widely circulated, the defining feature of the Secular Enlightenment was democratic republicanism and freedom of thought, not the abolition of property. Most revolutionaries sought to redistribute power and limit the excesses and abuses of wealth and corporate power specifically, but directly rejected the idea of communism and did support private property, specifically as defined by Thomas Paine As Artificial Property as an inalienable inherent human right. For them, abolishing property would lead to anarchy and destroy the incentives for labor and innovation, which as history has demonstrated, would be the great undoing of communism. The goal was never to abolish property, but to break up monopolistic cronyism, aristocratic land hoarding, and corporate overreach so that every individual could possess the economic opportunity and independence required. While his atheism was influential, his economic radicalism, the abolition of private property, was rejected, censored and ignored by his contemporaries, including the most radical philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot. But he is relevant to the historical context especially when understanding how the Secular Enlightenment diverged explicitly from socialism, which became its ultimate rival and enemy.

Meslier's abolition of property marked the definitive split between the Secular Enlightenment and modern socialism and it clarifies why figures like Paine, Spinoza, and later radical republicans viewed property rights as essential to checking corporate overreach, preserving innovation, and maintaining the material foundation of human freedom, ensuring that individuals retained control over their own labor and capacity, preventing the state or private oligarchs from reducing citizens to dependency. Whereas for people Like Marx, those very rights enabled despotism. The radical republican framework aimed to smash corporate monopolies, curb predatory economic privileges, and use mechanisms like land/resource dividends, as Paine proposed, to ensure widespread economic independence. Economics today in America is antithetical to the vision of the American founding fathers and Liberty to a great degree, and is cronyism not free enterprise.