Anti-church movements and Humanism

Diderot the man who brought the encyclopaedia as work-instrument for free thought

In history the followers of the Nazarene Jew Jeshua found many times that people opposed them, came with false teachings, luring people in false organisations, trying to get them away from synagogue and ecclesia, creating a anti-church movement.

To get some anti-church reaction under way, sometimes the teachers were not afraid to present themselves as martyrs. In 1600 with the execution, or martyrdom to some, of Giordano Bruno for heresy by the Inquisition some consider it to be the beginning of the modern Freethought movement.
In its earliest roots the Freethought movement explicitly organized itself as anti-church, or more specifically anti-dogma and anti-hierarchy.  “Free” “Thought” simply referred to thought free of the control religious institutions.

When you take Freethought to be a philosophical viewpoint that holds free opinions, it should be formed on the basis of free thinking, not bounded to dogma's but following logic, reason, and empiricism and not authority, tradition, or other dogmas. Freethought should then be build on an experience by which people also allow others to think freely and to pose questions and to give answers according to their own experiences in this life on earth.

We would expect from such a free thinker he or she also allow free thinking to the other, but recently we have seen many so called freethinkers and humanists who want to press their own ideas onto others and laugh with those who prefer to keep on the idea of there be existing a Supreme Divine Being, Creator of heaven and earth.

Those ‘freethinking’ people not always are so free thinking as they seem to pretend. More than once they also are anti religion people, though not always atheists or secular paganists.

What we would like to see of those practitioners of freethought or ‘freethinkers’ is that they stimulate interaction of thought.  Freethought holds that individuals should not accept ideas proposed as truth without recourse to knowledge and reason. Freethinkers should strive to build their opinions on the basis of facts, scientific inquiry, and logical principles, independent of any logical fallacies or the intellectually limiting effects of authority, confirmation bias, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, sectarianism, tradition, urban legend, and all other dogmas.

For a lot of freethinkers there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena and therefore to come to worship and having meetings for holding certain rites, having a formation of religion, would be considered wrong because it would give a sign of a believe upon insufficient evidence.

Toward the end of the 17th century in England the term ‘free-thinker emerged and was used to describe those who stood in opposition to the institution of the Church, and of literal belief in the Bible. Several people had started to examine the Bible and to compare it with the dogmatic teachings of the 'catholic' and traditional state church. They were convinced in what the Bible taught that each should examine the Word of God and could be formed by it. They believe god loved His people so much He was willing to give it enough information so that they could come to learn the Truth. God wants everybody to study His Word and to come to understand the world through consideration of god His Creation (nature, plants and animals).


In 1697 William Molyneux wrote a widely publicized letter to John Locke. 16 years later Anthony Collins wrote his ‘Discourse of Free-thinking,’ which gained substantial popularity. In France, the concept first appeared in publication in 1765 when Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Arouet de Voltaire, who disliked the Jews, not because of racial prejudice but because they seemed to him responsible for Christianity, included an article on ‘Libre-Penseur’ in their ‘Encyclopédie.’

The European freethought concepts spread so widely that even places as remote as the Jotunheimen, in Norway, had well-known freethinkers, such as Jo Gjende, by the 19th century

According Paul Chiariello one of the oldest still running Freethought publications is The Freethinker, first published in Britain in 1881.

  In line with the reactionary origins of the movement, it’s founder, G. W. Foote, wrote of its purpose: “The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against superstition in general.”

However, the earliest roots of the Humanist movement identified itself as a religion.  Like other secular movements, for instance Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity, historic Humanism in the US, with a capital ‘H’, was designed as a brand new naturalistic religion. This is clearly seen in a document created by many of the first leading Humanist thinkers, scientists and activists: the First Humanist Manifesto 1933.  It states that:

Today man’s larger understanding of the universe, his scientific achievements, and deeper appreciation of brotherhood, have created a situation which requires a new statement of the means and purposes of religion.

The focus was on a broader definition of religion that included naturalistic and non-theistic worldviews.  Religion was something to be re-thought and updated instead of countered.

Please do find his ideas in: Is Humanism a Religion?

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A dialogue about the earth moving and spinning around the sun

The dangerous dialogue

Galileo’s groundbreaking book is finally translated into Dutch – and it’s a good read

There are some persistent misunderstandings about the Italian physicist Galileo Galilei and his historic “argument” with the Catholic Church. After his trial for heresy in 1633, in which he was condemned to house arrest for the rest of his life, 69-year-old Galilei is said to have uttered the famous phrase: “And yet it moves.”

Almost four centuries have passed since the trial, and the idea has become generally accepted that Galilei was a true martyr of science, prosecuted by the Inquisition and, according to many historians, even tortured. Some say that it was not only Galilei who stood trial, but science in general.

In reality, Galilei was put under house arrest in his Tuscan villa, where he could spend the rest of his life (he died nine years later) in relative luxury. The subject of the trial, a book, was put on the infamous Index, the church’s list of forbidden books, from which it was only removed in 1835.

English: * Description: Tomb of Galileo Galilei (Location: Santa Croce, Florence, Italy.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

That “pagan” book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was originally written in Italian in 1632. Only now, after nearly 400 years, has it been translated into Dutch.

In Dialogue, Galilei introduced his “new” world view, with the earth moving and spinning around the sun – taking away the former status of the earth as centre of the universe. It was a clear rejection of the philosophy of Aristotle, which was, in Galilei’s time, the main theory on how nature worked.

“Above all, Galilei wrote his book in a very understandable manner, so that even the common man could understand his ideas,” says Hans van den Berg, who has translated the Dialogue into Dutch. “Maybe that was why the church was so concerned about it. Also, the original is in Italian and not in Latin, which made this book accessible for everyone in Italy who could read – and not only for academics and priests who understood Latin.”

Revolutionary reading

A replica of the earliest surviving telescope attributed to Galileo Galilei, on display at the Griffith Observatory. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Presumably it takes a background in science, not just linguistic expertise, to translate a book like this? “Yes, I trained as a scientist,” explains Van den Berg. He lectured for decades in mathematics at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands until he retired a few years ago. “In 2001, I started to learn Italian as a hobby, which led to training to become a professional translator.”

And what, according to Van den Berg, makes the Dialogue so special? “First of all, it’s the content: Galilei gives fierce opposition to the theory of Aristotle, who was at that time the Catholic Church’s ‘house philosopher’. The science in this book really was revolutionary. Galilei’s ideas about movement, speed and acceleration were totally new – and, most importantly, they were backed up by evidence, thanks to the many observations he made with his self-constructed telescopes.”

And the book is, says the Dutch translator, “astonishingly well written. Galilei limited the pure maths to a minimum. And, like the title says, he wrote in a highly polemical way. He presents his ideas during a fictional discussion between three people: Salviati, who shares Galilei’s point of view; Sagredo, a neutral moderator; and Simplicio, a dedicated follower of Aristotle.” As you might have guessed, simplicio means “simpleton” in Italian.

Mural of Galileo Galilei (Photo credit: Children of the Concrete)

“As the discussion progresses, Salviati has no mercy with Simplicio’s arguments, and in some excerpts he just makes a fool of him,” continues Van den Berg. “It was this merciless style of writing that got Galilei into trouble. In the years before the publication of the Dialogue, he had quite a good relationship with Pope Urban VIII. So if he had written his ideas in a more conciliatory way, he might have avoided a trial – however, we can’t know for sure. Nevertheless, thanks to his polemical style, Galilei’s Dialogue remains one of the cornerstones of Italian literature – quite exceptional for a science book.”

Senne Starckx 

 

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