Freedom, generally, is having the ability to act or change
without constraint. Something is "free" if it can change easily and is
not constrained in its present state. In philosophy and religion, it is
associated with having free will and being without undue or unjust constraints, or enslavement, and is an idea closely related to the concept of liberty.
A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in
practice, be prevented by other forces. Outside of the human realm,
freedom generally does not have this political or psychological
dimension. A rusty lock might be oiled so that the key has the freedom
to turn, undergrowth may be hacked away to give a newly planted sapling
freedom to grow, or a mathematician may study an equation having many degrees of freedom.
In physics or engineering, the mathematical concept may also be applied
to a body or system constrained by a set of equations, whose degrees of
freedom describe the number of independent motions that are allowed to
it.
Free will
In philosophical discourse, freedom is discussed in the context of free will and self-determination, balanced by moral responsibility.
Advocates of free will regard freedom of thought as innate to the
human mind, while opponents regard the mind as thinking only the
thoughts that a purely deterministic brain happens to be engaged in at
the time.
Personal and social freedom or liberty
Four Freedoms, a series of paintings meant to describe the freedoms for which allied nations fought in World War II.
In some circumstances, particularly when discussion is limited to
political freedoms, the terms "freedom" and "liberty" tend to be used
interchangeably. Elsewhere, however, subtle distinctions between freedom and liberty have been noted. John Stuart Mill,
differentiated liberty from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if
not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the
power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary
restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such,
the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the
rights of others.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explains the differences in terms of their relation to institutions:
Liberty is linked to human
subjectivity; freedom is not. The Declaration of Independence, for
example, describes men as having liberty and the nation as being free.
Free will—the quality of being free from the control of fate or necessity—may first have been attributed to human will, but Newtonian physics attributes freedom—degrees of freedom, free bodies—to objects.
Freedom differs from liberty as
control differs from discipline. Liberty, like discipline, is linked to
institutions and political parties, whether liberal or libertarian;
freedom is not. Although freedom can work for or against institutions,
it is not bound to them—it travels through unofficial networks. To have
liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be
self-determining, autonomous. Freedom can or cannot exist within a state
of liberty: one can be liberated yet unfree, or free yet enslaved (Orlando Patterson has argued in Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture that freedom arose from the yearnings of slaves).
Another distinction that some political theorists have deemed important is that people may aspire to have freedom from limiting forces (such as freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from discrimination), but descriptions of freedom and liberty generally do not invoke having liberty from anything. To the contrary, the concept of negative liberty refers to the liberty one person may have to restrict the rights of others.
In
purely physical terms, freedom is used much more broadly to describe
the limits to which physical movement or other physical processes are
possible. This relates to the philosophical concept to the extent that
people may be considered to have as much freedom as they are physically
able to exercise. The number of independent variables or parameters for a system is described as its number of degrees of freedom.
For example the movement of a vehicle along a road has two degrees of
freedom; to go fast or slow, or to change direction by turning left or
right. The movement of a ship sailing on the waves has four degrees of
freedom since it can also pitch nose-to-tail and roll side-to-side. An
aeroplane can also climb and sideslip, giving it six degrees of freedom.
Degrees of freedom in mechanics describes the number of independent motions that are allowed to a body, or, in case of a mechanism
made of several bodies, the number of possible independent relative
motions between the pieces of the mechanism. In the study of complex motor control,
there may be so many degrees of freedom that a given action can be
achieved in different ways by combining movements with different degrees
of freedom. This issue is sometimes called the degrees of freedom problem.
"Freedom of Gait" in Dressage Theory (a concept in horse
training) refers to the horse's ability to reach his natural range of
motion (seen at liberty) under the rider. This can only be accomplished
if the rider has an independent seat. It must be established and
maintained in basic training and refers mostly to the biomechanical
articulation of the rear and front legs.
Some equations have many such variables. This notion is formalized as the dimension of a manifold or an algebraic variety. When degrees of freedom is used instead of dimension,
this usually means that the manifold or variety that models the system
is only implicitly defined. Such degrees of freedom appear in many
mathematical and related disciplines, including degrees of freedom as used in physics and chemistry to explain dependence on parameters, or the dimensions of a phase space; and degrees of freedom in statistics, the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary.
The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by United States PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt on Monday, January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech (technically the 1941 State of the Union address), he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy:
Roosevelt delivered his speech 11 months before the surprise Japanese attack on U.S. forces in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
that caused the United States to declare war on Japan, December 8,
1941. The State of the Union speech before Congress was largely about
the national security of the United States and the threat to other democracies from world war that was being waged across the continents in the eastern hemisphere. In the speech, he made a break with the tradition of United States non-interventionism that had long been held in the United States. He outlined the U.S. role in helping allies already engaged in warfare.
In that context, he summarized the values of democracy behind the
bipartisan consensus on international involvement that existed at the
time. A famous quote from the speech prefaces those values: "As men do
not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone." In the
second half of the speech, he lists the benefits of democracy, which
include economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the
promise of "adequate health care". The first two freedoms, of speech and
religion, are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. His inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights. Roosevelt endorsed a broader human right to economic security and anticipated what would become known decades later as the "human security" paradigm in social science and economic development. He also included the "freedom from fear" against national aggression and took it to the new United Nations he was setting up.
Historical context
In
the 1930s many Americans, arguing that the involvement in World War I
had been a mistake, were adamantly against continued intervention in
European affairs.
With the Neutrality Acts established after 1935, U.S. law banned the
sale of armaments to countries that were at war and placed restrictions
on travel with belligerent vessels.
When World War II
began in September 1939, the neutrality laws were still in effect and
ensured that no substantial support could be given to Britain and
France. With the revision of the Neutrality Act in 1939, Roosevelt
adopted a "methods-short-of-war policy" whereby supplies and armaments
could be given to European Allies, provided no declaration of war could
be made and no troops committed.
By December 1940, Europe was largely at the mercy of Adolf Hitler and
Germany's Nazi regime. With Germany's defeat of France in June 1940,
Britain and its overseas Empire stood alone against the military
alliance of Germany, Italy, and Japan. Winston Churchill, as Prime
Minister of Britain, called for Roosevelt and the United States to
supply them with armaments in order to continue with the war effort.
They also appeared on the reverse of the AM-lira,
the Allied Military Currency note issue that was issued in Italy during
WWII, by the Americans, that was in effect occupation currency,
guaranteed by the American dollar.
The Four Freedoms Speech was given on January 6, 1941. Roosevelt's
hope was to provide a rationale for why the United States should abandon
the isolationist policies that emerged from World War I. In the
address, Roosevelt critiqued Isolationism, saying: "No realistic
American can expect from a dictator's peace international generosity, or
return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of
expression, or freedom of religion–or even good business. Such a peace
would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. "Those, who would
give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve
neither liberty nor safety."
The speech coincided with the introduction of the Lend-Lease Act,
which promoted Roosevelt's plan to become the "arsenal of democracy" and support the Allies (mainly the British) with much-needed supplies.
Furthermore, the speech established what would become the ideological
basis for America's involvement in World War II, all framed in terms of
individual rights and liberties that are the hallmark of American
politics.
The speech delivered by President Roosevelt incorporated the following text, known as the "Four Freedoms":
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world
terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a
healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world
terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in
such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit
an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the
world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium.
It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.
That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new
order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a
bomb.
— Franklin D. Roosevelt, excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941
The declaration of the Four Freedoms as a justification for war would
resonate through the remainder of the war, and for decades longer as a
frame of remembrance.
The Freedoms became the staple of America's war aims and the center of
all attempts to rally public support for the war. With the creation of
the Office of War Information (1942), as well as the famous paintings by
Norman Rockwell, the Freedoms were advertised as values central to
American life and examples of American exceptionalism.
Opposition
The
Four Freedoms Speech was popular, and the goals were influential in
postwar politics. However, in 1941 the speech received heavy criticism
from anti-war elements. Critics argued that the Four Freedoms were simply a charter for Roosevelt's New Deal,
social reforms that had already created sharp divisions within
Congress. Conservatives who opposed social programs and increased
government intervention argued against Roosevelt's attempt to justify
and depict the war as necessary for the defense of lofty goals.
While the Freedoms did become a forceful aspect of American
thought on the war, they were never the exclusive justification for the
war. Polls and surveys conducted by the United States Office of War Information (OWI) revealed that "self-defense", and vengeance for the attack on Pearl Harbor were still the most prevalent reasons for war.
Limitations
In
a 1942 radio address, President Roosevelt declared the Four Freedoms
embodied "rights of men of every creed and every race, wherever they
live."
On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt authorized Japanese American internment and internment of Italian Americans with Executive Order 9066,
which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas"
as "exclusion zones," from which "any or all persons may be excluded."
This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were
excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and
much of Oregon, Washington, and Arizona, except for those in internment
camps.
By 1946, the United States had incarcerated 120,000 individuals of
Japanese descent, of whom about 80,000 had been born in the United
States.
United Nations
The concept of the Four Freedoms became part of the personal mission undertaken by First LadyEleanor Roosevelt regarding her inspiration behind the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights,
General Assembly Resolution 217A. Indeed, these Four Freedoms were
explicitly incorporated into the preamble to the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights which reads, "Whereas disregard and contempt for
human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the
conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings
shall enjoy the freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and
want has been proclaimed the highest aspiration of the common
people...."
Disarmament
FDR
called for "a world-wide reduction of armaments" as a goal for "the
future days, which we seek to make secure" but one that was "attainable
in our own time and generation." More immediately, though, he called for
a massive build-up of U.S. arms production:
Every realist knows that the
democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in
every part of the world... The need of the moment is that our actions
and our policy should be devoted primarily—almost exclusively—to meeting
this foreign peril. ...[T]he immediate need is a swift and driving
increase in our armament production. ...I also ask this Congress for
authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions
and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which
are now in actual war with aggressor nations. ...Let us say to the
democracies...
The Roosevelt Institute honors outstanding individuals who have demonstrated a lifelong commitment to these ideals. The Four Freedoms Award medals are awarded at ceremonies at Hyde Park, New York and Middelburg, Netherlands
during alternate years. The awards were first presented in 1982 on the
centenary of President Roosevelt's birth as well as the bicentenary of
diplomatic relations between the United States and the Netherlands.
Artist Hugo Ballin painted The Four Freedoms mural (1942) in the Council Chamber of the City Hall of Burbank, California.
New Jersey muralist Michael Lenson (1903–1972) painted The Four Freedoms mural (1943) for the Fourteenth Street School in Newark, New Jersey.
Muralist Anton Refregier painted the History of San Francisco (completed 1948) in the Rincon Center in San Francisco, California; panel 27 depicts the four freedoms.
Allyn Cox painted four Four Freedoms murals (completed 1982) which hang in the Great Experiment Hall in the United States House of Representatives; each of the four panels depicts allegorical figures representing the four freedoms.
In the early 1990s, artist David McDonald reproduced Rockwell's Four Freedoms paintings as four large murals on the side of an old grocery building in downtown Silverton, Oregon.
In 2008, Florida International University's Wolfsonian museum hosted the Thoughts on Democracy
exhibition that displayed posters created by 60 leading contemporary
artists and designers, invited to create a new graphic design inspired
by American illustrator Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms posters.
Freethought (or free thought) is an epistemologicalviewpoint which holds that positions regarding truth should be formed only on the basis of logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than authority, tradition, revelation, or dogma. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
a freethinker is "a person who forms their own ideas and opinions
rather than accepting those of other people, especially in religious
teaching." In some contemporary thought in particular, freethought is
strongly tied with rejection of traditional social or religious belief
systems. The cognitive application of freethought is known as "freethinking", and practitioners of freethought are known as "freethinkers".
Modern freethinkers consider freethought as a natural freedom from all
negative and illusive thoughts acquired from the society.
The term first came into use in the 17th century in order to
indicate people who inquired into the basis of traditional religious
beliefs. In practice, freethinking is most closely linked with secularism, atheism, agnosticism, 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 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.
Definition
Atheist author Adam Lee defines freethought as thinking which is independent of revelation, tradition, established belief, and authority,
and considers it as 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 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 freethought 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 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 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 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.
— Bertrand
Russell, The Value of Free Thought. How to Become a Truth-Seeker and
Break the Chains of Mental Slavery, from the first paragraph
The whole first paragraph of the essay makes it clear that a
freethinker 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 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
On 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 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. — Bertrand Russell, The Value of Free Thought. How to Become a Truth-Seeker and Break the Chains of Mental Slavery
In the 18th and 19th century, many thinkers regarded as freethinkers were deists, arguing that 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 freethought movement than atheists.
Characteristics
Among freethinkers, for 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 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 freethought; literature of the American Secular Union
inaugurated its usage in the late 1800s. The reasoning behind the pansy
as the symbol of freethought 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. Challenging Religious Dogma: A History of Free Thought, a pamphlet dating from the 1880s had this statement under the title "The Pansy Badge":
There is . . . need of a badge which shall express at first glance, without complexity of detail, that basic principle of freedom of thought for which Liberals
of all isms are contending. This need seems to have been met by the
Freethinkers of France, Belgium, Spain and Sweden, who have adopted the
pansy as their badge. We join with them in recommending this flower as a
simple and inexpensive badge of Freethought...Let every patriot
who is a Freethinker in this sense, adopt the pansy as his badge, to be
worn at all times, as a silent and unobtrusive testimony of his
principles. In this way we shall recognize our brethren in the cause,
and the enthusiasm will spread; until, before long, the uplifted
standard of the pansy, beneath the sheltering folds of the United States flag, shall everywhere thrill men's hearts as the symbol of religious liberty and freedom of conscience."
History
Pre-modern movement
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 SufiRubaiyat poems), and in other civilizations, such as the Chinese (note for example the seafaring renaissance of the Southern Song dynasty of 420–479), and on through heretical thinkers on esoteric alchemy or astrology, to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.
French physician and writer Rabelais
celebrated "rabelaisian" freedom as well as good feasting and drinking
(an expression and a symbol of freedom of the mind) in defiance of the
hypocrisies of conformistorthodoxy in his utopianThelema 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 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.
Modern movements
Freethought logo
The year 1600 is considered a landmark in the era of modern freethought. It was the year of the execution in Italy of Giordano Bruno, a former Dominican friar, by the Inquisition.
England
The term free-thinker emerged towards the end of the 17th century in England to describe those who stood in opposition to the institution of 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 the clergy of all churches and it is a plea for deism.
The Freethinker magazine was first published in Britain in 1881.
France
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 European freethought concepts spread so widely that even places as remote as the Jotunheimen, in Norway, had well-known freethinkers such as Jo Gjende by the 19th century.
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 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.
Freethought organizations developed the "Jugendweihe" (literally Youth consecration), 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" Freethought groups proliferated, becoming an organization of socialist parties. European socialist freethought groups formed the International of Proletarian Freethinkers (IPF) in 1925.
Activists agitated for Germans to disaffiliate from their respective
Church and for seculari-zation of elementary schools; between 1919–21
and 1930–32 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 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 freethought 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 the Nazis until the mid-1930s.
In the Netherlands, freethought 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 the 19th century, Freethought 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".
Switzerland
With 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.
Turkey
In the last years of the Ottoman Empire, freethought made its voice heard by 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– 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 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 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.
United States
The
Free Thought 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 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 the first national Free Thinkers 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 the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, the 19th century saw an immigration of German freethinkers and anti-clericalists to the United States.
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 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 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 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 the Unitarian Universalist Association) in 1955. D. M. Bennett was the founder and publisher of The Truth Seeker in 1873, a radical freethought and reform American periodical.
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 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 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
freethought organizations operated throughout southern Ontario and parts of Quebec, eliciting both urban and rural support.
The principal organ of the freethought 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 the fight to make
access to abortion free and legal in Canada.
Anarchism
In the United States of America,
"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 both freethought and anarchism. The individualist anarchist George MacDonald was a co-editor of Freethought and, for a time, The Truth Seeker. E.C. Walker was co-editor of the freethought/free love journal Lucifer, the Light-Bearer."
"Many of the anarchists were ardent freethinkers; reprints from freethought papers such as Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, Freethought and The Truth Seeker appeared in Liberty...The church was viewed as a common ally of the state and as a repressive force in and of itself."
In Europe, a similar development occurred in French and Spanish individualist anarchist circles:
"Anticlericalism, just as in the rest of the libertarian movement, in
another of the frequent elements which will gain relevance related to
the measure in which the (French) Republic begins to have conflicts with
the church...Anti-clerical discourse, frequently called for by the
French individualist André Lorulot, will have its impacts in Estudios
(a Spanish individualist anarchist publication). There will be an
attack on institutionalized religion for the responsibility that it had
in the past on negative developments, for its irrationality which makes
it a counterpoint of philosophical and scientific progress. There will
be a criticism of proselytism and ideological manipulation which happens
on both believers and agnostics".
These tendencies would continue in French individualist anarchism in the work and activism of Charles-Auguste Bontemps (1893-1981) and others. In the Spanish individualist anarchist magazines Ética and Iniciales
"there is a strong interest in publishing scientific news, usually linked to a certain atheist and anti-theist
obsession, philosophy which will also work for pointing out the
incompatibility between science and religion, faith, and reason. In this
way there will be a lot of talk on Darwin's theories or on the negation
of the existence of the soul".
In 1901 the Catalan anarchist and freethinker Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia established "modern" or progressive schools in Barcelona in defiance of an educational system controlled by the Catholic Church. The schools had the stated goal to "educate the working class
in a rational, secular and non-coercive setting". Fiercely
anti-clerical, Ferrer believed in "freedom in education", education free
from the authority of church and state.
Ferrer's ideas, generally, formed the inspiration for a series of Modern Schools in the United States, Cuba, South America and London. The first of these started in New York City in 1911. Ferrer also inspired the Italian newspaper Università popolare, founded in 1901.
