Showing posts with label Atheists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Atheists. Show all posts

Friday 29 August 2014

Anti-church movements and Humanism

English: Statue of Denis Diderot by Frédéric A...
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 ne 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?

Thursday 7 November 2013

American atheists most religiously literate Americans

While it’s unknown how many atheists use YouVersion or other Bible apps, polls show atheists are among the most religiously literate Americans, topping Jews, Mormons and other Christians in a 2010 Pew Research Center poll.

Atheists seem to use a Bible App containing the Christian Scriptures which they can quote to have the Christians “tripped up”. Christians seemed to be sitting at the bottom of the knowledge rung, having been topped not only by atheists but by Jews and Mormons as well.

The Pew Forum gives that on average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.

On questions about Christianity – including a battery of questions about the Bible – Mormons (7.9 out of 12 right on average) and white evangelical Protestants (7.3 correct on average) show the highest levels of knowledge. Jews and atheists/agnostics stand out for their knowledge of other world religions, including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism; out of 11 such questions on the survey, Jews answer 7.9 correctly (nearly three better than the national average) and atheists/agnostics answer 7.5 correctly (2.5 better than the national average). Atheists/agnostics and Jews also do particularly well on questions about the role of religion in public life, including a question about what the U.S. Constitution says about religion.

More than four-in-ten Catholics in the United States (45%) do not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the body and blood of Christ. About half of Protestants (53%) cannot correctly identify Martin Luther as the person whose writings and actions inspired the Protestant Reformation, which made their religion a separate branch of Christianity. Roughly four-in-ten Jews (43%) do not recognize that Maimonides, one of the most venerated rabbis in history, was Jewish.

In addition, fewer than half of Americans (47%) know that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. Fewer than four-in-ten (38%) correctly associate Vishnu and Shiva with Hinduism. And only about a quarter of all Americans (27%) correctly answer that most people in Indonesia – the country with the world’s largest Muslim population – are Muslims.

Other findings of the U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey include:
  • On world religions other than Christianity, about six-in-ten Americans (62%) know that most people in India are Hindus. About half know that Ramadan is the Islamic holy month (52%) and can name the Koran as the Muslim holy book (54%). Roughly one-third (36%) correctly associate striving for nirvana with Buddhism.
  • Two Missionaries of .
    Two Missionaries of . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
    Around four-in-ten Americans know that the Mormon religion was founded sometime after 1800 (44%) and that the Book of Mormon tells the story of Jesus appearing to people in the Americas (40%). About half (51%) correctly identify Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as a Mormon.
  • In addition to questions about religious knowledge, the survey included nine general knowledge questions (on history, politics, science and literature) for comparison purposes. These show, for example, that about six-in-ten Americans can name the vice president of the United States (59%) and understand that lasers do not work by focusing sound waves (60%). More than seven-in-ten (72%) correctly associate Susan B. Anthony with the movement to give women the right to vote, while just 42% know that Herman Melville was the author of the novel Moby Dick.
  • Overall, people who score well on the general knowledge questions also tend to do well on the religion questions. Atheists/agnostics and Jews correctly answer an average of roughly seven of the nine general knowledge questions. Among the public overall, the average respondent correctly answers 5.2 of these general knowledge questions.
  • While people with a high level of religious commitment do better than average on the religion questions, people with low levels of religious commitment do better than average on the general knowledge questions.
  • Many Americans are devoted readers of Scripture: More than a third (37%) say they read the Bible or other Holy Scriptures at least once a week, not counting worship services. But Americans as a whole are much less inclined to read other books about religion. Nearly half of Americans who are affiliated with a religion (48%) say they “seldom” or “never” read books (other than Scripture) or visit websites about their own religion, and 70% say they seldom or never read books or visit websites about other religions.

  • Mormons, black Protestants and white evangelicals are the most frequent readers of materials about religion. Fully half of all Mormons (51%) and roughly three-in-ten white evangelicals (30%) and black Protestants (29%) report that they read books or go online to learn about their own religion at least once a week. Only a small fraction of all religiously affiliated Americans – 6% of the general public and no more than 8% of any religious group – say they read books (other than Scripture) or visit websites to learn about religions other than their own at least once a week.


Enhanced by Zemanta