Rusting Car Bumper

Oh! my bad...

DC

Starboy

Gemma,

IMO one of the most important characteristics of a "freethinker" or a "free thinker" is the ability to hold their beliefs freely. In other words they must be willing to drop their beliefs for sufficient cause. If I understand it correctly, many sects of Christianity must hold to the beliefs of their religion even when presented with reasonable explanations contradicting them. This is usually referred to as faith and is a requirement of many religions and in particular Catholicism. It is funny that “faith” is a synonym for "religion”. IMO, if you have faith or religion you can’t be a “freethinker”.

Gemma, to me you appear to be a person who would be unwilling to drop their beliefs in god if presented with reasonable explanations that contradicted those beliefs. IMO that would make you are a person of "faith" and therefore you would not be a "freethinker" or a "free thinker".

Starboy

NOGO

What is freethinking?


To be free we must not be attached to our beliefs. We must at any time be ready to change our beliefs if sufficient evidence is presented to the contrary of our current beliefs.

The minute you have some attachment to a belief then you are no longer free. You are a slave of your emotions and no longer see reality for what it is. This does not apply to religion alone but any area of human endeaver, politics, business, etc... anything.

By definition a freethinker cannot hold any dogmas. Everything a freethinker believes must be questionable and verified again and again for its veracity.

A freethinker will never have an absolute truth. Truth simply reflect the strength of the evidence. Some truths may be stronger than others because they have survived many past verifications and criticism but none are beyond question and therefore absolute.

Relious faith is the anti-thesis of freethinking. The faithful start with a set of unquestioned truths and base all their thinking upon those absolute truths. The faithful are attached to their beliefs and their emotional well-being depend on it.

Godless Dave

NOGO, thanks for the reminder that religious dogma is not the only kind of dogma. Humans also get so attached to ideas like Communism or nationalism that they no longer think clearly

Novowels

At the core, a freethinker is someone who believes that the truth is the truth, as opposed to believing that X* is the truth.

I find it interesting that, almost to a person, freethinkers eventually find no reasons to believe in any gods; whereas revelators, those who believe something because of "divine revelation," find almost as many (often conflicting) gods as there are people.

*X being any faith or dogma, including a dogmatic belief in naturalism.

Starboy

I don't think that accepting dogma has anything to do with being a "freethinker" as long as you are willing to reconsider that acceptance if presented with conflicting rational explanations based on evidence. IMO you can't operate on a day to day basis without some dogma. If you restrict "freethinker" to no dogma then no one would qualify.

Starboy

Novowels

Yes, which is why I said "...believing X (dogma) as the truth." To be a freethinker one must be willing to change your beliefs to fit the truth, not balk at change because you don't want to change your belief. (as most religious people do)

I am not saying to not to have any beliefs.

Perhaps I should have used "...as The Truth[tm]"

Sabine Grant

Please bear with me if I give anyone a headache....

The notion of truth and reason are IMO quite relative to what we know as our present reality. Had we explored the entire Universe and discovered all that is still unknown to us now, I would say we can give an absolute definition to truth and reason. But we have not...we can only give temporary definitions of what reason implies in the course of thought of a freethinker or a theist.

We are limited by our reality. This reality can vary with another dimension.

So we have to be prudent in defining anything with the notion of "absolute". Faith is a necessity for the theist because it is about " believing the unbelievable", what is challenged by our reality in our physical world as we know it.

The extremes that oppose both the atheist who denies any existence of any divinity and his interaction within the entire Universe and the theist who maintains that only a divinity could set in motion that entire Universe both leave out the fact that we simply do not know.

Heck... I cannot prove that there is a God... but I have faith there is. And for myself I have evaluated that there is a probability that there is a Great Architect involved with mankind. I have chosen christianity as a representation of this Architect because for myself I appreciate and value the concept of a God who gives me an opportunity to dwell on hope rather than the oblivion of the "after death". It is my choice. I like the thought of having a soul. I like the thought of having been created and planned for a particular purpose. I like to consider a down syndrom child as equaly created for a particular purpose as myself. I do not make any differences. I like the terms " unique " and " special" for each human being. It is my preference and frankly that reason as we know it does not support my preference does not demean my faith.

Just echoing what Amie wrote....

NOGO

You may be right.
Certainly if every morning when I wake up I had to review all my beliefs before I do anything I would not be able to function.

But I thought I covered this when I said that some beliefs are stronger than others because we have good evidence and they have survived the test of time.

I think of dogma as something which is beyond question.
I suppose that you will say that there are things that we never question in order to function on a daily basis. But the point is not just that although we never question certain things we are certainly not opposed to questioning them compared to religious dogma whose questioning is forbidden.

NOGO

Please define "faith" as used above.
Really! I look up the word in dictionaries and ask people but still don't know what the word means.

You possess something that tells you that God exists and you call it faith. Faith can be quantized since people talk about "strong faith" as opposed to regular faith.

Please explain.

This is what I think you mean and I am sure that you will correct me.

Faith is the wish that God exists.
This wish is not supported by any evidence so you go on living as though it were true. The wish made "reality" by a mental process which I am unfamiliar with.