I Find It Offensive; How About You

[Judas BentHer]

Still, I find the term ridiculous when it's applied to religion or lack of religion. Can't you just call yourselves Atheists? Why do you have to call yourselves 'free thinkers'. To me, it seems like a word you apply to yourselves exclusively just so you can try to show everyone that you're better than all of the religious people out there. Just my opinion.

I think it's unfair to condemn the term freethinker as a word that holds no merit or, worse yet, is used so as to imply a superior status of an individual calling themselves a free thinker intends to imply they are then superior to Theists.

Freethinker isn't a new term created so as to piss off Theists by implication. It has a long history that dates back to the 1800's. Free thought is the intellectual stimulus that helped evolve humanity out of the Dark Ages. No term such as that need be applied at a time when exclusivist, elitist, repressive coercive intolerant theocratic agendas exercised in concert between the orthodoxy and the monarchy sought to manifest a conformist society. However, what became the term "freethinker" encapsulates what was inspiration for emancipation. Many things contributed to the evolution of a secular society. However, what is at issue here is that aspect that was contained and thus ruled by an establishment that sought to exploit the illiteracy, the poverty, the fear, desperation and superstitions of the impoverished peasantry as well as the members of the elite noble houses, so as to insure a slave conformist community amid the former population and a compliant entitled yet just as easily expendable community amid the later.

However, what helped to evolve that conformist united doctrine enforced by church and crown, was the free thought that rationalized in part that a benevolent god would not require his created children to be enslaved by ignorance and fear under the machinations of orthodoxy and crown authority, using the words of that god that were often contained in holy books but which the church authority deemed was not to be read by the lesser mortals that were any and all outside of the confines of church and crown.
Certainly a term; free thought, freethinker, was not the vehicle that manifest that minute inspiration to societal evolution and exodus from orthodoxy and repressive doctrines. It's simply a term that compartmentalizes what was the inspiration to dare to think outside the box that was constructed by orthodoxy to preclude any point of view save that which was said to be approved by the will of a god as interpreted by inspiration gleaned by the clergy and pronounced official by the crown.

So, with regard to that your interpretation of freethinker bears an interesting perspective. To imagine people who exercise rational thought think themselves better than those who may indeed be capable of rational thought yet exercise their personal free will and choose to set aside that intellect and assume for themselves an irrational philosophy as a way of life.

"Blasphemy is entirely a matter of opinion. What is blasphemy in one country is piety in another. Progress tends to reduce it from a crime to an affair of taste'. " George William Foote