(December 9, 2012 at 1:53 am)naimless Wrote: What is your definition of a free thinker in each time period? Protestants were once free thinkers in relation to Catholicism...To an extent I will go along with you, when protestants had no power they were all for the rights of the individual, but partly because it is inherent to philosophies that postulate a sky daddy, as soon as they got some power, they enforced their own way of thinking with the sword.
However that does not blacken philosophies that do not believe in force to limit thinking, it only depicts a difference between the two.