00:00 The Enlightenment was a massive intellectual and cultural shift that still has ripple effects today, with arguments like the one between Bill Maher and Ben Affleck about Islam being a prime example of the ongoing analysis of what happened during that time.

04:43 The Enlightenment was a period of intellectual and cultural change that involved the domination of reason over religion, the will of the people over the monarchy, and significant economic changes.

09:12 The Enlightenment challenged the authority of religion and established the power of the state over the will of God, leading to significant changes in society and the democratization of education.

13:37 The Renaissance revived the idea of humanism, challenging the belief that everything comes from God, and instead emphasizing human ability and the exploration of the human condition.

18:03 Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Voltaire emphasized the idea of natural rights and the social contract, where individuals give up certain rights to form a society.

22:25 Voltaire, living in exile in England, became a lightning rod for Enlightenment ideas, which threatened both the French monarchy and the church.

26:51 The Enlightenment thinkers were skeptics and critics of the establishment of government and the church, with Voltaire particularly hating the church and the idea of religion, and they believed in a clockmaker God who created everything but then left humans with free will, which was dangerous to the religious establishment; the French salons planted the seeds of democracy and a hostility toward religion that still exists today, and Montesquieu proposed the idea of a separation of powers in his book "The Spirit of the Laws."

31:55 The Enlightenment thinkers believed that government should stay out of people's affairs and allow for free trade, and David Hume was a skeptic who emphasized the importance of empirical proof and cause and effect.

36:17 The Enlightenment led to revolutions in the United States and France, with the American Revolution resulting in a successful democratic experiment and the French Revolution leading to chaos and violence, which some argue ended the age of enlightenment.

40:42 The Enlightenment ideas of Baruch Spinoza were more radical than what we typically think of as the Enlightenment, and some argue that if his ideas had been followed, there would be no governments or religion.