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Updated: May 14, 2025
Nothing can be further from the truth. The freethinker would have each theologian who tells his adherents that these men lend credence to their beliefs to consider the following: if the above-named men would be asked if they believed in a deity who actively interposed his will and influence in the lives of men, as is commonly expressed in the term "Providence," if they ascribed to the belief in personal immorality, if they themselves believed in the existence of a "soul," if they ascribed to the statement that "prayer" influenced the opinion of an all-powerful being to intercede for them in their problems and grief, if they believed that the Bible was a book dictated by God, or that a god caused to be written for him his "revelations"; that heaven and hell exist in the meaning that theologians assure their adherents that they do; that sin and morality is what theologians still hold it to be; that there has been a "fall" and therefore the necessity for a "redemption" of man; and that creed and dogma are necessary factors in the worship of a deity, what would their answers be?
How much may fairly be included under the title "Christian Morality"? Some of the more enlightened Christians would confine the term to the morality of the New Testament, and would exclude the Hebrew code as being the outcome of a barbarous age. But the Freethinker may fairly contend that any moral rules taught by the Bible are part of Christian morality.
Professor Huxley says that he deliberately adopted it because, "When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist, or an idealist, a Christian, or a freethinker, I found that the more I learned and reflected the less ready was the answer, until at last I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations except the last.... So I took thought and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of 'agnostic." And he goes on to explain that the term was used as antithetical to the "gnostic" of Church history who knew all about things of which Huxley felt himself in ignorance.
Gerald Massey, then on a visit to England, was churlishly refused a visiting order from the Home Office, but he sent me his two magnificent volumes on "Natural Genesis," and a note to the interim editor of the Freethinker, requesting him to tell me that I had his sympathy. "I fight the same battle as himself," said Mr. Massey, "although with a somewhat different weapon."
Yet, looking back over my year's torture in a Christian gaol, my conscience approves that dangerous policy, and I do not experience a single regret. In the same number of the Freethinker I referred at some length to Tyler's prosecution, which was dragging along its slow course in a way that must have been very provoking to Mr. Bradlaugh's enemies.
The sight of the red cross pinned on M. de Guersaint's jacket was also calculated to render him prudent; nevertheless his tongue won the victory. "Well, monsieur, opinions are free, are they not?" said he. "I respect yours, but for my part I don't believe in all that phantasmagoria! Oh I've never concealed it! I was already a republican and a freethinker in the days of the Empire.
No man now is quite so daring as to claim that Webster was a Christian. Neither was he a freethinker. He inherited his religious views from his parents, and never considered them enough to change. He simply viewed religion as a part of the fabric of government, giving sturdiness and safety to established order. His own spiritual acreage was left absolutely untilled.
Well, that is a matter of education. Of course we should follow it, because it is a safer guide than our present judgment, since it represents the judgment of all our ancestors. Utility is our only standard of right and wrong in morals, and we follow utility because we are not free and are therefore compelled to do so. Mr. Orthodox If you are through, Mr. Freethinker, I will now continue.
What does it all, this "evidence," amount to? One writer, Tacitus, records that a man, called by his followers "Christ" for no one pretends that Christ is anything more than a title given by his disciples to a certain Jew named Jesus was put to death by Pontius Pilate. And suppose he were, what then? How is this a proof of the religion called Christianity? Tacitus knows nothing of the miracle-worker, of the risen and ascended man; he is strangely ignorant of all the wonders that had occurred; and, allowing the passage to be genuine, it tells sorely against the marvellous history given by the Christians of their leader, whose fame is supposed to have spread far and wide, and whose fame most certainly must so have spread had he really performed all the wonderful works attributed to him. But no necessity lies upon the Freethinker, when he rejects Christianity, to disprove the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth, although we point to the inadequacy of the evidence even of his existence. The strength of the Freethought position is in no-wise injured by the admission that a young Jew named Joshua (i.e. Jesus) may have wandered up and down Galilee and Judæa in the reign of Tiberius, that he may have been a religious reformer, that he may have been put to death by Pontius Pilate for sedition. All this is perfectly likely, and to allow it in no way endorses the mass of legend and myth encrusted round this tiny nucleus of possible fact. This obscure peasant is not the Christian Jesus, who is as we shall later urge only a new presentation of the ancient Sun-God, with unmistakeable family likeness to his elder brothers. The Reverend Robert Taylor very rightly remarks, concerning this small historical possibility: "These are circumstances which fall entirely within the scale of rational possibility, and draw for no more than an ordinary and indifferent testimony of history, to command the mind's assent. The mere relation of any historian, living near enough to the time supposed to guarantee the probability of his competent information on the subject, would have been entitled to our acquiescence. We could have no reason to deny or to doubt what such an historian could have had no motive to feign or to exaggerate. The proof, even to demonstration, of these circumstances would constitute no step or advance towards the proof of the truth of the Christian religion; while the absence of a sufficient degree of evidence to render even these circumstances unquestionable must,
It was not easy, at any rate it was not easy in the Five Towns, for a timid man in reply to the question, "Are you in favour of a professed Freethinker sitting in the House of Commons?" to reply, "Yes, I am."
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