Freethought

It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Freethought or free thought is a philosophical stance which holds that opinions regarding any forms of truth should be formed on the basis of logic, reason, and experience, rather than authority, tradition, or dogmatic doctrines. The application of freethought is known as "freethinking", and practitioners of freethought are known as "freethinkers".

See also:

Absurdism

Agnosticism

Anarchism

Quotes

• I say that I am an agnostic. People think that's pusillanimous and covering your bets. But it's not based on any belief or yearning for an afterlife but on the fact that we actually know so little about the cosmos. It is a tribute to the complexity and, at our present stage of development, the unknowability of the universe.
  • Martin Amis, in "The New Amis" in The Telegraph (13 May 2000)

• As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.
  • Samuel Butler, The Way Of All Flesh (1917), p. 338

• Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong.
  • James Branch Cabell, in The Cream of the Jest : A Comedy of Evasions (1917)

• The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go. And in the work of abolishing it the Catholic and the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew, the Catholic and the Freethinker, the Catholic and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the Mahometan will co-operate together, knowing no rivalry but the rivalry of endeavour toward an end beneficial to all. For, as we have said elsewhere, socialism is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Christian nor Freethinker, Buddhist, Mahometan, nor Jew; it is only Human. We of the socialist working class realise that as we suffer together we must work together that we may enjoy together. We reject the firebrand of capitalist warfare and offer you the olive leaf of brotherhood and justice to and for all.
  • James Connolly, in Labour, Nationality and Religion (1910)

• One should not have the arrogance to declare that God does not exist.
  • Umberto Eco, quoted in "Belief or Nonbelief? : A Confrontation By Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini" in The Los Angeles Times (18 March 2000)

• I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.
  • Thomas Edison, in The Freethinker (1970), G.W. Foote & Company, Volume 90, p. 147

• The idea of a personal God is quite alien to me and seems even naive. However, I am also not a "Freethinker" in the usual sense of the word because I find that this is in the main an attitude nourished exclusively by an opposition against naive superstition. My feeling is insofar religious as I am imbued with the consciousness of the insufficiency of the human mind to understand deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as "laws of nature." It is this consciousness and humility I miss in the Free-thinker mentality.
  • Albert Einstein, in a letter to "Beatrice F___" (17 December 1952), in response to a question about whether he was a "free thinker", as quoted in Einstein and Religion : Physics and Theology (1999) by Max Jammer, p. 121-122

• When I reached intellectual maturity, and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist or a pantheist, a materialist or an idealist, a Christian or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer. The one thing on which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis" — had more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure that I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
  • Thomas Huxley, in ''Christianity and Agnosticism: A Controversy (1889)

• With most men, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in another.
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, in Notebook L (1793-1796), aphorism 81

• Freethought was a basically anti-christian, anti-clerical movement, whose purpose was to make the individual politically and spiritually free to decide for himself on religious matters. A number of contributors to Liberty were prominent figures in bot freethought and anarchism.
  • Wendy McElroy, in "The Culture of Individualist Anarchist In Late-Nineteenth Century America", in The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. V, No. 3 (Summer 1981)

• About belief or lack of belief in an afterlife: Some of you may know that I am neither Christian nor Jewish nor Buddhist, nor a conventionally religious person of any sort.
  I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without any expectation of rewards or punishments after I'm dead. My German-American ancestors, the earliest of whom settled in our Middle West about the time of our Civil War, called themselves "Freethinkers," which is the same sort of thing. My great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut wrote, for example, "If what Jesus said was good, what can it matter whether he was God or not?"
  I myself have written, "If it weren't for the message of mercy and pity in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, I wouldn't want to be a human being. I would just as soon be a rattlesnake."
  • Kurt Vonnegut, in God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (1999)

• It's important to abolish the unconscious dogmatism that makes people think their way of looking at reality is the only sane way of viewing the world. My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything. If one can only see things according to one's own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.
  • Robert Anton Wilson, in "Robert Anton Wilson : Searching For Cosmic Intelligence" - interview by Jeffrey Elliot (1980)