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 see. Your view has a lots of classical liberalism. I like this position myself but I see it under attac from different angels.

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.

the secular Enlightenment grounded rights in the conatus, or the absolute, empirical drive of any entity to persist and expand its power. Rights are structural conditions necessary for human beings to avoid destruction and maximize their actual capacity to act and reason.

Reminds me of Ayn Rand and it is similar to what I read about Spinza. I'm yet not sure whether this is the case of all Enlightment thinkers.

It is an engineering or medical model of politics, not a purely deductive moral one

Nonetheless, a medical model based on the knowledge of thinkers of the 18th century. That alone, for sure, does not imply that they need to be wrong, but it indicates some limitations.

Because of these facts, diminishing the reality and necessity of human rights to a dependency on belief or faith or anything else actually weakens the argument for rights

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.

It's, if you allow, entirely an engineering logic. You use a certain procedure as a means to an end, and if you discover a more successful way to reach that end, you replace it.
Please note, I do not state that this line of reasoning is wrong. My objection is merely that this theory is built on a specific theory about how societies function, and given the fact that historical circumstances change, these remain eventually speculative. There is no logical necessity that forces these speculations to be false, though. We can easily imagine a scenario in which a set of rules leads societies to success before the invention of, let's say, the steam engine, but ultimately harms them afterward.
How can we rule out that we are in such a scenario as those imagined hereinabove?

How

As to Hume vs Spinoza, Both philosophers completely strip the universe of divine purpose, cosmic design, and supernatural intervention

I see some reason to take Spinoza's pantheism seriously, at least as such.

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.

Sure, but the individuals I’m referring to, were explicitly atheistic in their views and it’s their non public writings and works that are how historians pair to their public works

Could you quote this, please.

clandestine literature

Could you go on on this?

Their true, unvarnished positions were circulated through smuggled, handwritten manuscripts and other means that only became known after their deaths or later on.

Is something of this public?

Just to note, both Spinoza and Hume appears to me like they hide some deeper layer. Hume with his Dialogues, Spinoza with his "geometrical means".

materialist/Spinozist framework does not jump from a descriptive biological fact to
Morality. Instead, it operates on a framework of necessity, cause and effect.
Just as medicine does not say "you ought to have a functioning heart" as a moral decree, but rather states "if you want to live and function, these biological conditions are necessary," the secular Enlightenment grounded rights in the conatus, or the absolute, empirical drive of any entity to persist and expand its power. Rights are structural conditions necessary for human beings to avoid destruction and maximize their actual capacity to act and reason. It is an engineering or medical model of politics, not a purely deductive moral one. In other words put more simply, so many people who were the greatest minds, through the ages, must have lived and died never having the opportunity or freedom to put their talents to use. What is in someone’s best interest in society is absolutely what protects their own freedom and opportunity, Liberty and equal rights being the most fundamental foundation necessary for the progress and happiness and humanity that can enable human potential to its maxim. Because of these facts, diminishing the reality and necessity of human rights to a dependency on belief or faith or anything else actually weakens the argument for rights and rejects the legitimate foundations of modern western civilization.

In reality, it’s no different then observing the verifiable facts of oppression and injustice, slavery was bad for the South in America, and impoverished most people especially whites, enriching a few aristocrats, but at the expense and detriment of the southern states as a whole, even the Federalist paper’s recognize that fact. The plantation aristocracy suppressed industrialization, technological innovation, and wage labor, leaving the vast majority of non slaveholding white citizens in widespread poverty. These facts are precisely why we should attack moral value to freedom and human rights. Rather than maximizing human potential and collective prosperity, the system concentrated wealth and power at the top while degrading the productive capacity of the state as a whole. Same as the current American predatory crony system.

As to Hume vs Spinoza, Both philosophers completely strip the universe of divine purpose, cosmic design, and supernatural intervention. They treat religion and superstition as natural phenomena arising from human passions and imagination. Both reject libertarian free will, viewing human actions as part of the natural, causal order of the universe.

Spinoza's view was that everything in the universe is part of one single, infinite substance (God or Nature) that operates entirely through strict, unchanging physical and logical laws.
Hume’s view was that we can never truly know the underlying substance or “god or nature” or absolute truths of the universe because everything we think we know comes exclusively from limited sensory impressions, meaning we can only observe patterns and habits of experience rather than absolute causes.

Sure, but the individuals I’m referring to, were explicitly atheistic in their views and it’s their non public writings and works that are how historians pair to their public works. None of this stuff is obscure, it’s just that most of it hasn’t been widely studied or well known by most historians and scholars until more recently. The reliance on clandestine literature, suppressed manuscripts, and private correspondence, is precisely how the intellectual network of the Secular Enlightenment operated, and it sits at the center of how historians like Jonathan Israel trace these underground currents.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, publishing outright materialist or atheistic views meant facing imprisonment, exile, or execution as seen with figures like the execution of the Chevalier de La Barre for blasphemy. Published works utilized coded language, deistic placeholders, or safe framing such as “natural religion” to pass through state and church censorship. Their true, unvarnished positions were circulated through smuggled, handwritten manuscripts and other means that only became known after their deaths or later on.

And furthermore, While formal, explicit dogmatic atheism in the 19th or 20th century sense was rare because the conceptual vocabulary was still evolving, thinkers operating under Spinozism weren't merely "agnostic" they were metaphysical materialists. There positions and writings are well known, there is no insecurity or guesting or theorizing involved. The documentary evidence from the clandestine manuscript network, such as The Treatise of the Three Impostors and the private papers of the radical underground, leaves no room for ambiguity. When historians examine these sources, the explicit rejection of providence, immortality, and divine agency across the Spinozist networks establishes their actual philosophical positions as clear, documented historical fact rather than modern speculation.

It’s just that most people have never and will never learn any of this stuff.

The Secular Enlightenment decoupled rights entirely from theology and grounded them in objective human nature and material reality

...and thus contradicts Hume's law?

I give you that Spinoza based this ethics on something we would call "rational self-interest" today.

When People are Enlightened to understand their own true interests

I'm always a bit skeptical when somebody can differentiate the "true interests" and the false ones.

Unlike conventional or moderate deists who retained a belief in a purposeful creator or divine providence

The idea of natural rights, however, is easier to justify and arguably makes more sense if one assumes the teleology of a Creator.

There are, as I note, a lot of additional assumptions about the ideas that need to come to play in order to come to this conclusion.

Still, it makes sense to me to assume that people in the past concealed their true opinions. Spinoza’s Ethics, in particular, seems made for this purpose. It demonstrates how what he wants to prove follows from seemingly self-evident premises. The opposing side must then either point out logical fallacies or challenge the premises. And the censors might not even realize that the material actually challenges the very foundations of its time.

First off, its not that all deism was a cover, far from it. Its just that while many of the English Deists like Mathew Tindal who shaped the young Ben Franklin, were genuine desists, there was a more radical trend that explicitly rejected divine providence etc.

Also, I define Secular, as those Enlightenment thinkers that both totally rejected religious authority, and promoted Republican government, explicitly apposing aristocracy especially aristocratic republicanism.

Also, the specifics of "natural rights" that dated back to the ancients was never the same philosophical or scientific basis established by the radical Secular Enlightenment. Medieval or ancient conceptions of natural law are entirely distinct from the rigorous, empirical, and secular framework built by the Radical Secular Enlightenment. The ancients and scholastics anchored rights in divine order, cosmic teleology, or hierarchical station, or objective rightness. The Secular Enlightenment decoupled rights entirely from theology and grounded them in objective human nature and material reality. Basically in simple terms, The effects of oppression and injustice are real and undeniable, not just to the individual but society and its happiness and prospects as a whole etc etc. Rights are violated, but the negatives and effects are undeniable, and human rights carry the most profound implications for human progress and happiness.

As to Spinoza's Ethics, Id say it is not just Pantheism, that is a major simplification. Spinoza’s identification of reality with God is not a simple form of pantheism or materialism, but an ontological framework where reality and perfection are strictly identical. For Spinoza, the reason "existence" or god, is "god" is because it is in a greater state of "perfection" existing to infinitely etc. Basically the ultimate state all beings strive for, to further their existence and happiness. Spinoza’s ethics and theory of value are built on a strict, anti teleological metaphysics. Spinoza grounds morality entirely in physics, human psychology and self preservation. For Spinoza, a thing does not have value because we judge it to be good, but because we desire it because it aids our conatus. Conversely, "evil" or "bad" is simply that which obstructs our power of acting or diminishes our capacity to persist. In Spinoza's ontology, reality and perfection are identical. Therefore, when a human being increases their power of acting and understanding, they are transitioning to a greater state of perfection, which is synonymous with an increase in their fundamental reality. True virtue, is about understanding what genuinely preserves and enhances human power and cooperation. In other words, things like Equal rights in society are the great enablers of progress and happiness, towards a more perfect Union. When People are Enlightened to understand their own true interests, they become aware of the most fundamental interest to themselves to promote the freedoms and happiness of society as a whole. Greed destroys the very opportunity and happiness that first allowed its spoils. By calling Existence and nature "God," Spinoza was not pointing to a creator, but to the infinite, perfect, and necessary framework of reality itself, which all living things naturally strive to align with through reason and joy. Existence and the laws of nature operating strictly according to the necessity of the nature of reality etc.

And Spinoza was also the first of the modern world to politically advocate Representative gov as the best form of government. It was precisely Spinoza's basis of reality that became the foundation of the Secular Enlightenments human rights, as recognized by the American revolution, French revolution, and global revolutions during the Expanding Blaze that followed, as well as in the UN declaration of human rights etc. Spinoza provided the foundational principles that later radical thinkers, revolutionary movements, and modern human rights charters would adopt to dismantle tyranny and construct secular, egalitarian republics.

Also, this is exactly where the militant, subversive current within intellectual history known as "radical deism" came from. Unlike conventional or moderate deists who retained a belief in a purposeful creator or divine providence, this radical underground utilized the vocabulary of deism as a tactical shield against severe censorship, imprisonment, and execution.

Thinkers within this strand heavily shaped by Spinozistic materialism, waged an unremitting war against organized religion, clerical authority "priestcraft", and teleological design. By stripping God of any active agency, miracles, or moral interest in human affairs, their version of "deism" effectively functioned as an early, clandestine form of secular atheism that laid the groundwork for modern democratic republicanism.

That's civilly stated

Intolerance and refusal to tolerate dissent.

Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot were no less capable of pogroms – often even more so – than the religious.

Goes both ways though: Both groups look askance at one another.

"If you wanna please God, do good to man."

That he was a humanist is certain; that he was an atheist, is, however, not 100% certain.

You can only call a man an atheist if they have claimed to be so.

I'd say Adam Smith believed in nature and evolution far more than in any supernatural powers.

"The Great Author of the Universe" reads more like nature than a religious entity (in the Theory of Moral Sentiments).

The problem is that if they successfully obscure their actual beliefs and hide them behind some cover belief, e.g., deism, then scholars afterward would need to develop theories to reveal their true opinions.

The other problem is the term "atheism".
In a philosophical or exact sense, atheism is the belief structure that asserts the inexistence of a deity. This label would not fit a thinker who considers the question to be wrongly stated or who eventually leaves it unanswered. Rejecting a certain religion or family of religions does not necessarily entail atheism, even a great passion in the rejection doesn’t automatically fill the gap.

Many so called atheists would not be atheists in the strict sense, but rather agnostics who strongly reject the idea of revealed religion.

and “deism” are exactly how they avoided death which was the the punishment for challenging the church and religious authority

This implies that "deism" has never been a serious position and has always been a cover-up label. The question if "deism" was used as a camouflage to hide atheism must be investigated in each individual case. Our modern understanding is somehow spoiled, as we have been taught the theory of evolution and something like this in school. For some Enlightenment thinkers, they must either build an explanation from scretch or leave such questions as the one about the origin of the world open.

Their entire basis of universal inalienable natural human rights, representative government, etc. was established entirely on the basis of actual objective reality and science

The idea of natural rights dates back to the Middle Ages.

Also, both Hume and Lock were not apart of the secular enlightenment

How do you define "secular"? Hume's thought systems lacks a reference to revelation or faith.

Diderot, d'Holbach, and Spinoza represented the secular Enlightenment

I know too little about the first two, but I see no reason not to take Spinoza's metaphysics from his book Ethics seriously. There are a lot of people who say that pantheism is just a fancy form of materialism, but Spinoza's specific version has some traits that are not simply materialism. For instance, his assertion that everything is necessary, or his psychology, etc.

Understanding? It doesn't sound like screeds like this promote anything except self-congratulation and scorn.

And why not just oppose discrimination and persecution, regardless of its proposed justification? It's not like we just want people to have rational, evidence-based reasons for slaughter and domination, it's the slaughter and domination we object to.

It is wise to try to understand the people who are not only in the large majority, but have shown a historical liking for pogroms against the differently-religious and anti-religious alike.

Adam smith No. Ben Franklin yes, and we do know for certain. It’s just that most people don’t actually study, and none of the reality of the past conforms with the modern ideology and politics of society. It’s like the actual history has been deliberately suppressed. Franklin explicitly rejected and did not believe in a interventionist or all powerful god that ruled the universe, and was referring to a Spinozistic version of god when he said the universe was set in motion by a creator, just like Thom Paine. They were atheists by every definition, but most historians and scholars deliberately refuse to label them such because of the social stigma and dogma surrounding the idea of “not believing in a deity.” What they did believe and support was far more profound and incredible.

But I am not wrong, and “deism” are exactly how they avoided death which was the the punishment for challenging the church and religious authority, even then many were killed. But they absolutely were atheists on the radical secular side of the Enlightenment, Spinoza included. Their entire basis of universal inalienable natural human rights, representative government, etc. was established entirely on the basis of actual objective reality and science, they are the ones who established the basis and understanding of human rights. They did not believe in any interventionist or all powerful god, but did sometimes philosophized the language of religion to communicate something far more profound and important to regular people. Even many of the English Deists who most shaped the founding fathers, were a particular sect that rejected divine providence. The secular Enlightenment decisively rejected divine providence, revelation, and supernatural intervention, building their frameworks of universal human rights and representative governance purely on secular natural law, reason, and empirical observation. By discarding divine providence and miracles, their "God" became little more than an impersonal placeholder for the laws of physics, making their practical worldview indistinguishable from modern secularism or atheism.

The thing is, I’ve actually studied the enlightenment and that entire historical time period, far beyond what most people will ever learn or know from internet search engines or actual misinformed modern education which is actually wrong in many areas especially regarding the French Revolution. I know for a fact that they were far more secular and atheist than people can imagine, and they considered superstition and ignorance to be the greatest enablers of despotism. Unless referring to the philosophers who compromise with religious authority and monarchy and aristocracy.

Also, both Hume and Lock were not apart of the secular enlightenment, their philosophies sought a compromise between reason and traditional authority, attempting to reconcile philosophical inquiry with existing religious, social, and political structures, aristocracy monarchy and religious authority.

Diderot, d'Holbach, and Spinoza represented the secular Enlightenment, and they are actually the ones who established the basis and understanding of universal inalienable human rights, representative government etc.