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Freethought

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Freethought is a philosophical doctrine that holds that beliefs should be formed on scientific facts and inquiry and not comprised by authority, tradition or any belief system that restricts logical reasoning. The cognitive application of freethought is known as freethinking, and practitioners of freethought are known as freethinkers.

Contents

Overview

The pansy has long been a symbol of freethought, and is used in the literature of the American Secular Union. This is because the flower gets its name from the French word pensée, which means "thought". It was so named because the flower resembles a human face, and in the month of August it nods forward as if deep in thought.
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The pansy has long been a symbol of freethought, and is used in the literature of the American Secular Union. This is because the flower gets its name from the French word pensée, which means "thought". It was so named because the flower resembles a human face, and in the month of August it nods forward as if deep in thought.

Premise

Freethinkers strive to build their beliefs on facts, logic and rational analysis, independent of the factual/logical fallacies and intellectually-limiting effects of authority, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, urban legend, popular culture, prejudice, and tradition. A line from "Clifford's Credo" by the 19th Century British mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford declares "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." Because many popular beliefs are based on tradition or authority, freethinkers' opinions are often at odds with established views.

Freethinkers neither accept nor reject ideas proposed as truth without recourse to facts and reason. A rejection of any ideas on the basis of prejudice and dogmatic attitudes is inconsistent with the commonly stated principles of freethought — though it occurs nonetheless, as freethinkers are subject to fallacy as are other people. Freethinkers who strive to follow the discipline of the scientific method can reduce the errors they make, but it is impossible to be completely error-free when forming judgements.

Religion

Given presently-known facts, established scientific theories, and logical principles, many freethinkers hold that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena such as gods, angels, demons, reincarnation, heaven, hell, ghosts, and other religious and magical concepts, and thus reject religious dogma entirely. However, rejection of religious dogma is sometimes founded on the traditional arguments against religion, which in the extreme becomes dogmatic in its own right. In contrast, there are also individuals who believe that one can believe in religious or magical concepts and still be a freethinker; such people practice freethought only for issues that are not within their own religious dogma.

History

Ancient freethought

Freethought was advocated in philosophical Buddhism by Gautama Buddha in the text Kalama Sutta:

"It is proper for you, Kalamas [the people of the villiage of Kesaputta], to doubt, to be uncertain; uncertainty has arisen in you about what is doubtful. Come, Kalamas. Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing; nor upon tradition; nor upon rumor; nor upon what is in a scripture; nor upon surmise; nor upon an axiom; nor upon specious reasoning; nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over; nor upon another's seeming ability; nor upon the consideration, 'The monk is our teacher.' Kalamas, when you yourselves know: 'These things are bad; these things are blameable; these things are censured by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to harm and ill, abandon them."

Modern freethought

Birth in England and France

The term Free-Thinker emerged toward the end of the 17th century in England, as opposition to the institution of the church and literal belief in the bible. Instead the view emerged that man could understand the world through consideration of nature. These positions were formally documented for the first time in 1697 by William Molyneux in a widely publicized letter to John Locke and more extensively in 1713 when Anthony Collins wrote his Discourse of Free-Thinking, which gained substantial popularity. In France, the concept first appeared in publication when Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Voltaire included in an article on Libre-Penseur in their Encyclopédie in 1765; the article was strongly atheistic. The European freethought concepts spread widely so that even places as remote as the Jotunheim in Norway had well-known freethinkers such as Jo Gjende by the 19th century.

The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881.

Early German movement

In Germany during the period (1815-1848) before the March Revolution, the resistance of citizens against the dogma of the church increased. In 1844 under the influence of Johannes Ronge and Robert Blum the belief in the rights of man, tolerance among men, and humanism grew and by 1859 they established the Bund Freireligiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands. This union still exists today, and is included as a member in the umbrella organization of free humanists. In 1881 in Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig Büchner established Deutschen Freidenkerbund as the first German organization for atheists. In Hamburg in 1882 the social-democratic Freidenker-Gesellschaft was formed.

United States movement

Driven by revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw immigration of German freethinkers and atheists to the United States. They appear to be the first in the United States to refer to themselves as Freethinkers. Many of them settled in Texas, founding the town of Comfort, Texas, as well as others. Their settlements had no church buildings, and these newcomers were persecuted and sometimes killed for their opposition to the institution of slavery. In 1994, a few freethinkers founded the Church of Freethought, which now exists as two active congregations of freethinkers: the North Texas Church of Freethought and the Houston Church of Freethought.

German Freethinker settlements were located in –

See also

External links

Local Freethought organizations

Miscellaneous

References

 

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