![]() ![]() Unfortunately, the main focus of Freethinkers has all too often had to be the business of embarrassing theologians simply to get to the point of freeing the mind for thought. It is simply thought that is free to consider any kind of facts and, especially, those that have been embarrassing theologians for thousands of years. It is not thought that is free from the strictures of facts and reason. Indeed, the "free" in Freethought is redundant and connotes not some different kind of thought. So Freethought is rooted in a devotion to facts and reason. When we discover inconsistencies in what we suppose we know or understand, we must either ignore them or come up with better explanations, but no more than are necessary to make sense of the facts. Our species has literally created what we know and understand about the world from a chaos of perceptions. For to turn a body of facts into an explanation is to bring order or simplicity to what is often, to begin with, a mass of confusion. It is worth noting that consistency and simplicity are, in essence, the same thing. That is, "entities should not be multiplied without necessity." Sometimes people today say, simply: "Keep It Simple, Stupid!" The latter principle often goes by the name of "The Parsimony Principle" or "Occam's Razor," after the heretical 14 th Century monk who asserted that: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem Second, given two ways of explaining such facts, the simpler way of doing so is to be preferred. And although I think many people are fairly good at spotting inconsistency and hypocrisy, here is the sort of thing that Freethinkers often see that believers don't with respect to consistency: ![]() ![]() Put simply, ideas have to be related to the facts under consideration in a nonarbitrary, noncontradictory and dependable way. Now we could spend a lifetime studying formal logic and its technical language of p's and q's and other things:īut the important thing to remember is that reason reduces to two principles. When we play by those rules we are being rational, which is why Freethought is more or less synonmous with Rationalism. Thought - real thought, not the perverse and pernicious misrepresentations of thought that often go by the same name - is subject to the rules of thought. But they are not Freethinkers, because Freethought is not thinking - much less believing - in anything at all or in whatever you want so long as it is free from compulsion. There doubtless are those who form their opinions and even live their lives by such standards. Likewise, such things as antifreeze, antibiotics and antihistamines are very useful things.īut if you form your opinions "about questions of religion" without regard to tradition, authority, and established belief, then what are you relying on to form those opinions? A coin toss? Whim? The oracular words of someone sufficiently eccentric as to be arguably, not "an authority" - Noam Chomsky, for example, or Ayn Rand? Molly Ivins? Rush Limbaugh? How about personal revelation? Dreams? Or perhaps just whatever is convenient at the moment? It's not such a bad thing, for example, to be anti-slavery or anti-crime, or to be against bigotry or drunk driving. It only tells you what Freethought isn't. Now notice that this dictionary definition of Freethought is "negative." It doesn't tell you what Freethought is. opinions about questions of religion formed independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. But this sort of terminological precision can't be applied in much of everyday life.įree thought, n. Now when the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemists - IUPAC - rules on matters of chemical nomenclature, it is authoritative in the sense that chemists the world over have agreed to abide by its decisions and no scientific journal will publish papers that depart from its standards.īut then, no one gets worked up over IUPAC's edict that it's OK to use choline O-(dihydrogen phosphate) and O-phosphonocholine interchangeably, or even contract the latter to phosphocholine, but not to refer to this molecule as phosphorylcholine. And they have the advantage of each being "worth a thousand words!" For the same reason, the pictures in a birding field guide do not correspond exactly to what real birds look like. ![]()
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