(August 15, 2017 at 12:57 pm)Fr33Th1nker Wrote:(August 15, 2017 at 7:25 am)Harry Nevis Wrote: You believe in god, and are a freethinker. This ought to be good.
BTW, I'm a huge midget.
I don't know if you are being sarcastic but just in case you are and if you think that you are a free thinker or believe that free thinking should be exclusive to atheist only maybe you would want to consider what I will post below.
A standard dictionary defines a freethinker as “one that forms opinions on the basis of reason independently of authority; especially one who doubts or denies religious dogma.” What this means is that to be a freethinker, a person has to be willing to consider any idea and any possibility. The standard for deciding the truth-value of claims is not tradition, dogma, or authorities — instead, it must be reason and logic.
The term was originally popularized by Anthony Collins (1676-1729), a confidant of John Locke who wrote many pamphlets and books attacking traditional religion. He even belonged to a group called “The Freethinkers” which published a journal entitled “The Free-Thinker.”
Collins used the term as essentially a synonym for anyone who opposes organized religion and wrote his most famous book, The Discourse of Free Thinking (1713) to explain why he felt that way. He went beyond describing freethinking as desirable and declared it to be a moral obligation:
Because he who thinks freely does his best toward being right, and consequently does all that God, who can require nothing more of any Man than that he should do his best, can require of him.
As should be obvious, Collins did not equate freethinking with atheism — he retained his membership in the Anglican church. It wasn’t belief in a god which attracted his ire, but instead, people who simply “take the Opinions they have imbibed from their Grandmothers, Mothers or Priests.”
WHY ATHEISM AND FREETHOUGHT ARE DIFFERENT
At the time, freethinking and the freethought movement was usually characteristic of those who were deists just as today freethinking is more often characteristic of atheists — but in both cases, this relationship is not exclusive. It is not the conclusion which differentiates freethought from other philosophies, but the process.
A person can be a theist because they are a freethinker and a person can be an
So what? If you're using Collins as an authority for Freethought/Deism, then you are going against the definition. His opinion doesn't make it fact.
"The last superstition of the human mind is the superstition that religion in itself is a good thing." - Samuel Porter Putnam