The Rationalists

The Rationalists
#1) The Rationalists were a group of people who believed in the theory that an individual's actions and beliefs should be based on reason, rather than on intuition or the teachings of others. They were people who formed opinions by reasoning instead of because someone said so. They believed everything had a logical explanation and felt as if it was their duty to provide it. They believed in God, but they didn’t believe he had the say in everything. They knew he created the universe but it was up to the people to find out everything you didn’t know. Nothing happened just because; there was always a logical explanation. They were based on evidence.
On the other hand, the Puritans beliefs were all basically based upon someone’s thoughts and opinions. The Puritans felt man was evil, and God was the only one who did everything to perfection. They felt if the river by your house suddenly produced nothing but contaminated inedible fish, then you had done something to upset god and he was punishing you. They believed God had the supreme authority over all human affairs.
The main difference between the Puritans and Rationalists is in their view of mankind. While the Rationalists felt man was both good and bad. Puritans thought men were all evil. Rationalists felt that man could improve himself with education; Puritans thought you could improve only if god wanted you to. To Rationalists the intelligence of man was limitless. To puritans you are only what god chose you to be. With rationalists more importance was given to scientific reasoning and less to God's wrath. A modern day example of these two would be the September 11th crisis. The Puritans would say it was because God no longer wanting that type of business to be around so he sent his people out to destroy it. Those people didn’t do anything wrong because they were just following God’s word; the Rationalists would probably break it all the way down saying that we weren’t cooperating with other countries, and we upset them and in result they took action and did what they felt was right.

#3) The way Ben Franklin made goals for himself to improve himself shows he was a Rationalists. He knew that he was not perfect, but there were ways to improve his imperfection; and so he wrote out all the logical things he could work on to fix him. "..but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another and so on….".

#4)
Patience- learn to take your time with everything
Silence-everything is not meant to be said.
Serenity-learn to accept things as they are
Sincerity-always
Humble-
Excitement-live to the fullest…you never know
Chastity-never use sex as a payback, nor to hold on to something that’s not good for you
Order-have goals… they actually help
Money-money is a must
Justice-do unto others as you would want done unto you

I believe that if I follow these virtues I would reach happiness. I think everything on my list is very important and if I was to alter just one of them, my over all goal of happiness wouldn’t be reached. Each one of these virtues are connected in a way so that they feed off of each other and helps increase each others importance. If I had to choose the most important one it would probably be serenity.

#5)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal- the Rationalists didn’t believe that God chose certain people to be higher than one from start.
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government- it was up to the people to determined their own lives. If something went wrong with the government we, as the people, have the right to alter it so that it can correctly govern. Its not left in God’s hands.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.-the interest was of the people, it was up to the people to keep the people happy.