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59-627: In the first issue, on September 1, 1873, editor D. M. Bennett and his wife Mary Wicks Bennett proclaimed that the publication would devote itself to: "science, morals, free thought, free discussions, liberalism, sexual equality, labor reform progression, free education, and whatever tends to elevate and emancipate the human race." Subsequent editors included Eugene and George E. Macdonald, Charles Lee Smith (along with his associate editors Woolsey Teller and later Robert E. Kuttner ), James Hervey Johnson , Bonnie Lange , and Roderick Bradford . For several years, Susan H. Wixon had editorial charge of

118-412: A "broader umbrella" than atheism "that embraces a rainbow of unorthodoxy, religious dissent, skepticism, and unconventional thinking." The basic summarizing statement of the essay The Ethics of Belief by the 19th-century British mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford is: "It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The essay became

177-486: A free-thinker." Freethinkers hold that knowledge should be grounded in facts, scientific inquiry , and logic. The skeptical application of science implies freedom from the intellectually limiting effects of confirmation bias , cognitive bias , conventional wisdom , popular culture , prejudice , or sectarianism . Atheist author Adam Lee defines free thought as thinking which is independent of revelation, tradition, established belief, and authority , and considers it as

236-540: A landmark in the era of modern free thought. It was the year of the execution in Italy of Giordano Bruno , a former Dominican friar, by the Inquisition . Prior to World War II , Australia had high rates of Protestantism and Catholicism. Post-war Australia has become a highly secularised country. Donald Horne , one of Australia's well-known public intellectuals , believed rising prosperity in post-war Australia influenced

295-612: A notion to be considered true it must be testable, verifiable , and logical. Many freethinkers tend to be humanists , who base morality on human needs and would find meaning in human compassion , social progress , art, personal happiness, love, and the furtherance of knowledge . Generally, freethinkers like to think for themselves, tend to be skeptical, respect critical thinking and reason, remain open to new concepts, and are sometimes proud of their own individuality . They would determine truth for themselves – based upon knowledge they gain, answers they receive, experiences they have and

354-529: A number of failed business ventures over the years. In 1873, they founded a freethought publication called The Truth Seeker . The reputation of the magazine grew but it also ran afoul of the Comstock Laws and D. M. Bennett was jailed for 11 months, forcing Mary Bennett to take over as editor and publisher. He died in 1884 and she sold the magazine to Eugene Macdonald the next year. Freethought Freethought (sometimes spelled free thought )

413-485: A rallying cry for freethinkers when published in the 1870s, and has been described as a point when freethinkers grabbed the moral high ground. Clifford was himself an organizer of free thought gatherings, the driving force behind the Congress of Liberal Thinkers held in 1878. Regarding religion , freethinkers typically hold that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena. According to

472-617: A secular " confirmation " ceremony, and atheist funeral rites. The Union of Freethinkers for Cremation was founded in 1905, and the Central Union of German Proletariat Freethinker in 1908. The two groups merged in 1927, becoming the German Freethinking Association in 1930. More "bourgeois" organizations declined after World War I , and "proletarian" free thought groups proliferated, becoming an organization of socialist parties. European socialist free thought groups formed

531-566: Is an unorthodox attitude or belief. A freethinker holds that beliefs should not be formed on the basis of authority , tradition , revelation , or dogma , and should instead be reached by other methods such as logic , reason , and empirical observation . According to the Collins English Dictionary , a freethinker is "One who is mentally free from the conventional bonds of tradition or dogma, and thinks independently." In some contemporary thought in particular, free thought

590-689: Is included as a member in the umbrella organization of free humanists. In 1881 in Frankfurt am Main , Ludwig Büchner established the Deutscher Freidenkerbund ( German Freethinkers League ) as the first German organization for atheists and agnostics. In 1892 the Freidenker-Gesellschaft and in 1906 the Deutscher Monistenbund were formed. Free thought organizations developed the " Jugendweihe " (literally Youth consecration ),

649-426: Is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favour, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem. A freethinker, according to Russell, is not necessarily an atheist or an agnostic, as long as he or she satisfies this definition: The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of

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708-449: Is strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief systems. The cognitive application of free thought is known as "freethinking", and practitioners of free thought are known as "freethinkers". Modern freethinkers consider free thought to be a natural freedom from all negative and illusive thoughts acquired from society. The term first came into use in the 17th century in order to refer to people who inquired into

767-876: Is the Fédération nationale de la libre pensée , created in 1890. In Germany, during the period 1815–1848 and 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 , belief in the rights of man, tolerance among men, and humanism grew, and by 1859 they had established the Bund Freireligiöser Gemeinden Deutschlands (literally Union of Free Religious Communities of Germany ), an association of persons who consider themselves to be religious without adhering to any established and institutionalized church or sacerdotal cult. This union still exists today, and

826-631: Is widely regarded a symbol of the victims of Christian religious intolerance ; La Barre along with Jean Calas and Pierre-Paul Sirven , was championed by Voltaire. A second replacement statue to de la Barre stands nearby the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris at the summit of the butte Montmartre (itself named from the Temple of Mars ), the highest point in Paris and an 18th arrondissement street nearby

885-557: The American Secular Union inaugurated its usage in the late 1800s. The reasoning behind the pansy as the symbol of free thought lies both in the flower's name and in its appearance. The pansy derives its name from the French word pensée , which means "thought". It allegedly received this name because the flower is perceived by some to bear resemblance to a human face, and in mid-to-late summer it nods forward as if deep in thought. In

944-566: The Church , and the literal belief in the Bible . The beliefs of these individuals were centered on the concept that people could understand the world through consideration of nature. Such 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. This essay attacks

1003-644: The Era of Manifestations , Wicks participated in a number of activities that were thought to manifestations of the spirit world, such as spirit visions from an angel named Sha Ka Na La Vinda. In 1843, she and Semantha Fairbanks created a series of "sacred sheets", Shaker gift drawings made in pen and ink. Some of those drawings were covered in a kind of sacred writing that has been described as "visual glossolalia ." In September 1846, she and her future husband DeRobigne Mortimer Bennett and another Shaker couple secretly fled New Lebanon permanently. They married and engaged in

1062-478: The Freedom from Religion Foundation , "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." and "Freethinkers are convinced that religious claims have not withstood the tests of reason. Not only is there nothing to be gained by believing an untruth, but there is everything to lose when we sacrifice

1121-452: The Sacré-Cœur is also named after Lefebvre de la Barre. The 19th century saw the emergence of a specific notion of Libre-Pensée ("free thought"), with writer Victor Hugo as one of its major early proponents. French Freethinkers ( Libre-Penseurs ) associate freedom of thought, political anti-clericalism and socialist leanings. The main organisation referring to this tradition to this day

1180-608: The Vrije Universiteit Brussel , along with the two Circles of Free Inquiry (Dutch and French speaking), defend the freedom of critical thought, lay philosophy and ethics , while rejecting the argument of authority . In 1873, a handful of secularists founded the earliest known secular organization in English Canada , the Toronto Freethought Association. Reorganized in 1877 and again in 1881, when it

1239-399: The "Oracle of The Div(in)e Bottle", he learns the lesson of life in one simple word: "Trinch!" , Drink! Enjoy the simple life, learn wisdom and knowledge, as a free human. Beyond puns, irony, and satire, Gargantua's prologue- metaphor instructs the reader to "break the bone and suck out the substance-full marrow" (" la substantifique moëlle "), the core of wisdom. The year 1600 is considered

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1298-778: The 1880s, following examples set by freethinkers in France, Belgium, Spain and Sweden, it was proposed in the United States as "the symbol of religious liberty and freedom of conscience". Critical thought has flourished in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, in the repositories of knowledge and wisdom in Ireland and in the Iranian civilizations (for example in the era of Khayyam (1048–1131) and his unorthodox Sufi Rubaiyat poems). Later societies made advances on freedom of thought such as

1357-514: The 1950s, the Truth Seeker started publishing explicitly racist content. Under the editorship of Charles Lee Smith beginning in 1937, Smith, Woolsey Teller and their successor James Hervey Johnson championed antisemitism , scientific racism and white supremacy . Anthropologist Robert Sussman described the Truth Seeker as a "virulent anti-Semitic publication". In 1995, authors Mark Fackler and Charles H. Lippy noted: "Under Smith and Johnson,

1416-611: The 19th century, free thought in the Netherlands has become more well known as a political phenomenon through at least three currents: liberal freethinking, conservative freethinking, and classical freethinking. In other words, parties which identify as freethinking tend to favor non-doctrinal, rational approaches to their preferred ideologies, and arose as secular alternatives to both clerically aligned parties as well as labor-aligned parties. Common themes among freethinking political parties are "freedom", "liberty", and " individualism ". With

1475-429: The 19th century. François-Jean Lefebvre de la Barre (1745–1766) was a young French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary . La Barre is often said to have been executed for not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession, but the elements of the case were far more complex. In France, Lefebvre de la Barre

1534-683: The Chinese (note for example the seafaring renaissance of the Southern Song dynasty of 1127–1279), on through heretical thinkers on esoteric alchemy or astrology , to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation pioneered by Martin Luther . French physician and writer Rabelais celebrated "rabelaisian" freedom as well as good feasting and drinking (an expression and a symbol of freedom of

1593-519: The International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) in 1925. Activists agitated for Germans to disaffiliate from their respective Church and for secularization of elementary schools; between 1919–1921 and 1930–1932 more than 2.5 million Germans, for the most part supporters of the Social Democratic and Communist parties, gave up church membership. Conflict developed between radical forces including

1652-552: The Nazis until the mid-1930s. In the 19th century, received opinion was scandalized by George Ensor (1769–1843). His Review of the Miracles, Prophecies, & Mysteries of the Old and New Testaments (1835) argued that, far from being a source of moral teaching, revealed religion and its divines regarded questions of morality as "incidental"--as a "mundane and merely philosophical" topic. In

1711-514: The Netherlands, free thought has existed in organized form since the establishment of De Dageraad (now known as De Vrije Gedachte ) in 1856. Among its most notable subscribing 19th century individuals were Johannes van Vloten , Multatuli , Adriaan Gerhard and Domela Nieuwenhuis . In 2009, Frans van Dongen established the Atheist-Secular Party, which takes a considerably restrictive view of religion and public religious expressions. Since

1770-795: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless and Social Democratic forces in Western Europe led by Theodor Hartwig and Max Sievers . In 1930 the Soviet and allied delegations, following a walk-out, took over the IPF and excluded the former leaders. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, most free thought organizations were banned, though some right-wing groups that worked with so-called Völkische Bünde (literally "ethnic" associations with nationalist, xenophobic and very often racist ideology) were tolerated by

1829-457: The Toronto association, T. Phillips Thompson , became a central figure in the city's labour and social-reform movements during the 1880s and 1890s and arguably Canada's foremost late nineteenth-century labour intellectual. By the early 1880s scattered free thought organizations operated throughout southern Ontario and parts of Quebec , eliciting both urban and rural support. The principal organ of

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1888-798: The Turks read the Quran and think about it, they will leave Islam. Atatürk described Islam as the religion of the Arabs in his own work titled Vatandaş için Medeni Bilgiler by his own critical and nationalist views. Association of Atheism ( Ateizm Derneği ), the first official atheist organisation in Middle East and Caucasus, was founded in 2014. It serves to support irreligious people and freethinkers in Turkey who are discriminated against based on their views. In 2018 it

1947-597: The United States declined in the early twentieth century. By the early twentieth century, most freethought congregations had disbanded or joined other mainstream churches. The longest continuously operating freethought congregation in America is the Free Congregation of Sauk County, Wisconsin, which was founded in 1852 and is still active as of 2020 . It affiliated with the American Unitarian Association (now

2006-693: The abolition of slavery. The " Golden Age of Freethought " in the US came in the late 1800s. The dominant organization was the National Liberal League which formed in 1876 in Philadelphia. This group re-formed itself in 1885 as the American Secular Union under the leadership of the eminent agnostic orator Robert G. Ingersoll . Following Ingersoll's death in 1899 the organization declined, in part due to lack of effective leadership . Freethought in

2065-438: The balance they thus acquire. Freethinkers reject conformity for the sake of conformity, whereby they create their own beliefs by considering the way the world around them works and would possess the intellectual integrity and courage to think outside of accepted norms , which may or may not lead them to believe in some higher power . The pansy serves as the long-established and enduring symbol of free thought; literature of

2124-412: The basis of traditional beliefs which were often accepted unquestioningly. Today, freethinking is most closely linked with agnosticism , deism , secularism , humanism , anti-clericalism , and religious critique . The Oxford English Dictionary defines freethinking as, "The free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief, unrestrained by deference to authority; the adoption of the principles of

2183-504: The children's department. In 1988, Madalyn Murray O'Hair put out several issues under the masthead during the course of an unsuccessful attempt to take over the company; however, the courts ruled against her ownership. Morris Altman, Mark Twain , Robert G. Ingersoll , Katie Kehm Smith , Elizabeth Cady Stanton , Clarence Darrow , Harry Houdini , Steve Allen , Paul Krassner , and Gay Talese are or have been contributors, subscribers, and supporters of The Truth Seeker . Starting in

2242-646: The clergy of all churches and it is a plea for deism . The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881; it continued in print until 2014, and still exists as a web-based publication. The freethought movement first organized itself in the United States as the "Free Press Association" in 1827 in defense of George Houston, publisher of The Correspondent , an early journal of Biblical criticism in an era when blasphemy convictions were still possible. Houston had helped found an Owenite community at Haverstraw, New York in 1826–27. The short-lived Correspondent

2301-410: The decline in church-going and general lack of interest in religion. "Churches no longer matter very much to most Australians. If there is a happy eternal life it's for everyone ... For many Australians the pleasures of this life are sufficiently satisfying that religion offers nothing of great appeal", said Horne in his landmark work The Lucky Country (1964). The Université Libre de Bruxelles and

2360-566: The fight to make access to abortion free and legal in Canada. In France, the concept first appeared in publication in 1765 when Denis Diderot , Jean le Rond d'Alembert , and Voltaire included an article on Liberté de penser in their Encyclopédie . The concept of free thought spread so widely that even places as remote as the Jotunheimen , in Norway , had well-known freethinkers such as Jo Gjende by

2419-784: The first national freethinkers organization, the "United States Moral and Philosophical Society for the General Diffusion of Useful Knowledge". It was founded on August 1, 1836, at a national convention at the Lyceum in Saratoga Springs with Isaac S. Smith of Buffalo , New York, as president. Smith was also the 1836 Equal Rights Party 's candidate for Governor of New York and had also been the Workingmen's Party candidate for Lt. Governor of New York in 1830. The Moral and Philosophical Society published The Beacon , edited by Gilbert Vale. Driven by

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2478-600: The free thought movement in Canada was Secular Thought (Toronto, 1887–1911). Founded and edited during its first several years by English freethinker Charles Watts (1835–1906), it came under the editorship of Toronto printer and publisher James Spencer Ellis in 1891 when Watts returned to England. In 1968 the Humanist Association of Canada (HAC) formed to serve as an umbrella group for humanists, atheists, and freethinkers, and to champion social justice issues and oppose religious influence on public policy—most notably in

2537-482: The indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition. Most freethinkers consider religion to be not only untrue, but harmful." However, philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote the following in his 1944 essay The Value of Free Thought : What makes a freethinker 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

2596-558: The introduction of cantonal church taxes in the 1870s, anti-clericals began to organise themselves. Around 1870, a "freethinkers club" was founded in Zürich . During the debate on the Zürich church law in 1883, professor Friedrich Salomon Vögelin and city council member Kunz proposed to separate church and state . In the last years of the Ottoman Empire , free thought made its voice heard by

2655-450: The mind) in defiance of the hypocrisies of conformist orthodoxy in his utopian Thelema Abbey (from θέλημα: free "will"), the device of which was Do What Thou Wilt : So had Gargantua established it. In all their rule and strictest tie of their order there was but this one clause to be observed, Do What Thou Wilt; because free people ... act virtuously and avoid vice. They call this honor. When Rabelais's hero Pantagruel journeys to

2714-515: The name, 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, but in the measure of a man's emancipation he deserves to be called a free thinker. Fred Edwords , former executive of the American Humanist Association , suggests that by Russell's definition, liberal religionists who have challenged established orthodoxies can be considered freethinkers. On

2773-438: The nature of God can only be known from a study of nature rather than from religious revelation. In the 18th century, "deism" was as much of a 'dirty word' as "atheism", and deists were often stigmatized as either atheists or at least as freethinkers by their Christian opponents. Deists today regard themselves as freethinkers, but are now arguably less prominent in the free thought movement than atheists. Among freethinkers, for

2832-522: The other hand, according to Bertrand Russell , atheists and/or agnostics are not necessarily freethinkers. As an example, he mentions Stalin , whom he compares to a " pope ": what I am concerned with is the doctrine of the modern Communistic Party, and of the Russian Government to which it owes allegiance. According to this doctrine, the world develops on the lines of a Plan called Dialectical Materialism , first discovered by Karl Marx , embodied in

2891-400: The paper became more conservative and advocated white supremacy along with atheism. While Northern European ethnocentrism had been an implicit theme since the paper's founding, its open racism and xenophobia offended many readers. In recent years its circulation has declined to less than a thousand." Freethought historian Tom Flynn noted that "1950 to 1988 marked its most troubled period, when

2950-530: The periodical embraced racism, eugenics, and anti-Semitism, but precisely because of that achieved the smallest impact in its history." After Johnson's death in 1988, Bonnie Lange assumed the role of publisher and editor and the "racism, anti-Semitism, white supremacism, eugenics advocacy, and other marginal interests of the Smith-Teller and Johnson years were conclusively abandoned." Mary Wicks Bennett Mary Wicks Bennett (April 28, 1819 – July 31, 1898)

3009-515: The practice of a great state by Lenin , and now expounded from day to day by a Church of which Stalin is the Pope. […] Free discussion is to be prevented wherever the power to do so exists; […] If this doctrine and this organization prevail, free inquiry will become as impossible as it was in the middle ages, and the world will relapse into bigotry and obscurantism. In the 18th and 19th century, many thinkers regarded as freethinkers were deists , arguing that

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3068-504: The revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw an immigration of German freethinkers and anti-clericalists to the United States (see Forty-Eighters ). In the United States, they hoped to be able to live by their principles, without interference from government and church authorities. Many Freethinkers settled in German immigrant strongholds, including St. Louis , Indianapolis , Wisconsin , and Texas , where they founded

3127-555: The town of Comfort , Texas, as well as others. These groups of German Freethinkers referred to their organizations as Freie Gemeinden , or "free congregations". The first Freie Gemeinde was established in St. Louis in 1850. Others followed in Pennsylvania, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, and other states. Freethinkers tended to be liberal, espousing ideals such as racial, social, and sexual equality, and

3186-463: The works of distinguished people such as Ahmet Rıza , Tevfik Fikret , Abdullah Cevdet , Kılıçzade Hakkı, and Celal Nuri İleri . These intellectuals affected the early period of the Turkish Republic . Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – field marshal , revolutionary statesman, author, and founder of the secular Turkish nation state , serving as its first President from 1923 until his death in 1938–

3245-601: Was an American Shaker apostate and magazine editor. Mary Wicks was born on April 28, 1819 in Reading, New York , one of ten children of Job Wicks and Polly Prentiss. In 1824, the Wicks family joined the Shaker community at Watervliet , probably due to poverty. In January 1825, Mary and her brother Thomas were moved away from their family to the Shaker community in New Lebanon . During

3304-557: Was renamed the Toronto Secular Society, the group formed the nucleus of the Canadian Secular Union, established in 1884 to bring together freethinkers from across the country. A significant number of the early members appear to have come from the educated labour "aristocracy", including Alfred F. Jury, J. Ick Evans and J. I. Livingstone, all of whom were leading labour activists and secularists. The second president of

3363-510: Was reported in some media outlets that the Ateizm Derneği would close down because of the pressure on its members and attacks by pro-government media, but the association itself issued a clarification that this was not the case and that it was still active. The term freethinker emerged towards the end of the 17th century in England to describe those who stood in opposition to the institution of

3422-783: Was superseded by the Free Enquirer , the official organ of Robert Owen 's New Harmony community in Indiana, edited by Robert Dale Owen and by Fanny Wright between 1828 and 1832 in New York. During this time Robert Dale Owen sought to introduce the philosophic skepticism of the Free Thought movement into the Workingmen's Party in New York City. The Free Enquirer' s annual civic celebrations of Paine's birthday after 1825 finally coalesced in 1836 in

3481-597: Was the practitioner of their ideas. He made many reforms that modernized the country. Sources point out that Atatürk was a religious skeptic and a freethinker. He was a non-doctrinaire deist or an atheist , who was antireligious and anti-Islamic in general. According to Atatürk, the Turkish people do not know what Islam really is and do not read the Quran . People are influenced by Arabic sentences that they do not understand, and because of their customs they go to mosques. When

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