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What Is Freethought?
While it is true that most freethinkers
are non-religionists and that the vast majority are atheists, the fact
remains that freethought is not exclusive to irreligion. Note the following
excerpt from well known freethinker Dan
Barker:
| free-think-er
n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently
of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists,
agnostics and rationalists.
No one can
be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah.
To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy
is no guarantee of truth.
|
The leadership of the North
Texas Church of Freethought sees things just a bit differently:
| Freethinkers
attach much more importance to the 'why' of belief than to the 'what.'
Freethinkers believe in the sort of human understanding that naturally
follows from a careful and rational consideration of the relevant factual
evidence. With regard to the natural world of human experience, therefore,
freethinkers regard the scientific method as the proper approach and scientific
knowledge as the most reliable sort of human understanding. Freethinkers
also acknowledge that there is an inner, private, subjective world of human
experience. But they also recognize that our feelings and emotions cannot
and should not be the basis of what we believe about the reality of the
world which all human beings share.
(North Texas Church of Freethought, What Is A Freethinker?) |
And one of the leading advocates
of freethought,
Bertrand Russell,
saw things differently still:
| What makes a free thinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought, he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. |
Freethought is not about whether a belief is true--it is about the reasons an individual has for holding a belief. It's about intellectual freedom and integrity, and the precedence of reason over faith and credulity/gullibility. Anyone who holds a belief, whether religious or political or social, for reasons other than it is his/her personal reasonable conclusion, is clearly not a freethinker.
Once again, Bertrand Russell on
freethought:
| 'Free thought' means thinking freely.…To be worthy of the name (freethinker) he must be free of two things: the force of tradition, and the tyranny of his own passions. No one is completely free from either, and in the measure of man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker. |
Read what others are saying about the philosophy and issues of freethought in Articles & Essays.