Freethinking and orthodoxy..
A great ‘freethought’ listen, on your cell phone or computer.. Manley P. Hall, an interesting 20th Century mystic freethinker. A lifelong lecturer he gave a biographical lecture presentation on 17th Century William Penn’s free thought ‘Holy Experiment’. Penn’s freethinking venture became an early founding of constitutional government and subsequently the State of Pennsylvania. Manly P. Hall - William Penn, the Quaker, and His Holy Experiment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuRD0-tTbr8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuRD0-tTbr8 ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony...@yahoo.com> wrote : Freethinking and orthodoxy.. Whitman "Whitman believed in the Inner Light. In 1890, he told Horace Traubel, who recorded Whitman's conversations from 1888 until the poet's death, that he subscribed to Hicks's views of spirituality." Anecdotes about Elias Hicks (1888) by Walt Whitman November Boughs essay "Elias Hicks" (1888)https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anecdotes_about_Elias_Hicks https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Anecdotes_about_Elias_Hicks Elias Hicks: He preached that people could experience salvation without the aid of ordained clergy. God dwells within every person, he explained, and reveals truths to each one by means of the Inner Light. Employing their free will, people could choose salvation by submitting to the will of God revealed to them, or they could choose sin by rejecting God's will to follow their "independent will" (Hicks 336). From 1779 through 1829, the Quaker minister journeyed more than forty thousand miles to locations primarily in the Northeast; but he also made trips to Virginia (1797, 1801, 1819, 1828), to the northern shore of Lake Ontario, Canada (1803, 1810), and to Richmond, Indiana (1828). https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_192.html https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_192.html An Orthodox Indictment of L. Mott Reguler, The Orthodox indictment of spiritual regeneration movement: The case of L Mott. http://quakertheology.org/issue-10-mott-CEF-01.htm http://quakertheology.org/issue-10-mott-CEF-01.htm .. .. “And this power flowed through him -- he became its agent -- whenever he put himself in a position to receive it. It had drawn him also to the Quakers of New Bedford, who were having a schism and revival in 1828. He visited them often, especially Mary Rotch. “What is this Inner Light?” he asked her. “It is not a thing to be talked about,” she replied. But he drew her out, and she said she had been driven inward, in these years of the Quaker Schism,” The Life of Emerson, Brooks. .. .. Creeds Creed..a set of beliefs or aims that guide someone's actions, a brief authoritative formula of religious belief. a creed is a set of beliefs, principles, or opinions that strongly influence the way people live or work creed is a religion. any system, doctrine, or formula of religious belief, as of a denomination. any system or codification of belief or of opinion. an authoritative, formulated statement of the chief articles of belief, as the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, or the Athanasian Creed. . . / “In the 18th and 19th century, many thinkers regarded as freethinkers were deists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deists, arguing that the nature of God https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_nature_of_God_in_Western_theology&action=edit&redlink=1 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.[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought#cite_note-13[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freethought#cite_note-14 Deists today regard themselves as freethinkers, but are now arguably less prominent in the freethought movement than atheists.” . . W. E. Channing, in Channing’s sequence of time in the coming on of Emerson and others, bringing a closure to Puritanism in New England.. “The divine attributes,” Channing writes, “are first developed in ourselves and hence transferred to our Creator. The idea of God, sublime and awful as it is, is the idea of our own spiritual nature, purified and enlarged to infinity.” “When Channing whistled, if his friends had only known it, that was the end of Calvinism for Boston.” The Life of Emerson, Brooks. . . 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 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 Freethought, Vs. the true believer.. true believer. noun. One who is deeply, sometimes fanatically devoted to a cause, organization, or person: “a band of true believers bonded together against all those who did not agree with them” ( Theodore Draper ) : a person who professes absolute belief in something : a zealous supporter of a particular cause ..true believers who fought the good fight even when it was out of fashion. ..it's impossible to argue with those true believers, as they think any counterevidence, is proof of an evil conspiracy. True-believers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer . . “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 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 . . "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
