“In actual modern Europe a freethinker does not mean a man who thinks for himself. It means a man who, having thought for himself, has come to one particular class of conclusions, the material origin of phenomena, the impossibility of miracles, the improbability of personal immortality and so on.” – G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy
That’s how many people define Freethought, yes. Some make the distinction between “free thought” and “freethought”, which is debatable. Freethought as a movement, with a capital F, can be defined as you have done above.
advancedatheist
Funny how people keep coming up with basically the same materialist view of reality, from different starting points, by following their own inquiries.
And funny how this seems to happen organically, without any central planner working to bring it about, like a Hayekian spontaneous order. Many Europeans who rediscovered Epicureanism during and after the Renaissance found this materialist outlook sufficiently challenging to their inherited christian beliefs that they revived the Epicurean tradition in defiance of their church and its ability to get the state to imprison or execute them for their skepticism of christian authority. It looks as if many of us have materialism-shaped holes in our hearts.
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