“On the other hand, according to Bertrand Russell, atheists and/or agnostics are not necessarily freethinkers. As an example, he mentions Stalin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin, whom he compares to a "pope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_Materialism, first discovered by Karl Marx https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx, embodied in the practice of a great state by Lenin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_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.” — Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought. How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery Freethought is the philosophy that man rules his own destiny, rejecting the notion that there is any kind of divine intervention in life. Belief centers on the idea that nature and Natural Law guide mankind and that the use of reason, epistemology, and science are the means by which life is validated.
Freethought came to Wisconsin with the massive influx of German immigrants in the 1850s, particularly those known as "Forty-eighters" who had fled autocratic German states after the failed revolts of 1848. https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS1926 https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Article/CS1926 The “kidnapped” monument to German freethinkers in the Texas hill country https://medium.com/k%C3%BChner-kommentar/the-kidnapped-monument-to-german-freethinkers-in-the-texas-hill-country-4aee0c1f518c https://medium.com/k%C3%BChner-kommentar/the-kidnapped-monument-to-german-freethinkers-in-the-texas-hill-country-4aee0c1f518c 1850’s.. Freethinkers refused to accept political absolutism and the authority of a church, religion, or its supposedly inspired scripture. They insisted on the freedom to form religious opinions on the basis of intellectual reasoning powers and not on blind, unquestioned faith. Freethinking became fashionable in the German state of Prussia during the reign of Frederick the Great, who ruled from 1740-53, within a period known as the "Age of Reason." "Freethinkers" Of the Early Texas.. https://ffrf.org/legacy/fttoday/1998/april98/scharf.html https://ffrf.org/legacy/fttoday/1998/april98/scharf.html ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : "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 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." .. "The person who is free in any respect is free from something; what is the free thinker free from? To be worthy of 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." — Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought. How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery, from the first paragraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought
