The unhappy stories of Prado and da Costa show that the mythos of confessional religion is unsustainable without spiritual exercises. Reason alone can produce only an attenuated deism that is easily abandoned, as its God is remote, abstract, and ultimately incredible. And yet at the same time as the Jewish community in Amsterdam was being torn apart by these conflicts, the Christians of Europe had begun to develop their own form of deism; like Prado, they too would regard scientific rationality as the only route to truth and would seek a rational certainty that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim
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