Freethought Is Free but not Cheap

A church signboard reads, "Freethinkers are Satan's slaves." Well, isn't that special. Reminds me of the movie One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Jack Nicholson plays a sane man stuck in an insane asylum. He is sticking up for the rights of his fellow inmates, waging a real battle against institutional oppression. He pays a heavy price. And then you find out all these sad sacks are in the place by their own choice. No one's keeping them there, no one but themselves. Jack was fighting the wrong enemy. "We have met the enemy and he is us" as a talking muskrat once said. I believe this well describes the church with the signboard. They are afraid of freedom. They want to "escape from freedom" (Eric Fromm). They have mortgaged their souls to the Grand Inquisitor. They want him to do their thinking for them. It is they who are the slaves. They have the Stockholm Syndrome, rejoicing in their oppression—which they entered into voluntarily, as when the last of the Hasmonean rulers invited the Romans in to settle their disputes, surrendering their hard-won freedom in the process. They have subscribed to the Orwellian maxim: "Freedom Is Slavery." They're like the old man hanging by wrist manacles on the mossy prison wall in Monty Python's The Life of Brian (of Nazareth): "Crucifixion? Best thing the Romans ever did for us!"

Have I cussed them out sufficiently? Good. Now let me get on to a larger issue implied in the idiotic message of the signboard. Just what is free thought? What is a free thinker? We usually associate the word with religion rejecters. They announce that they have cast off the shackles of dogma. Church told them what to believe. Theologians said that was only natural, since the truth about supramundane things is not available to human sight and reasoning. If we are to know them at all, they must be revealed to the human race by God, and they have been. The only possible response is faith. But how can you know a particular set of scriptures or doctrines has really been revealed by God? Well, that's another thing you're just going to have to believe, since in the nature of the case there's no way to verify it. Freethinkers have opted out. They suspect a con job in progress. But let's assume good motives all around; there is still the problem of willing yourself to believe something. Sure, plenty of people do it, but a real thinker knows that would commit him to Orwellian Doublethink. Deep down you know you don't know that doctrine A or religion X is true, yet you tell yourself that you do. The Freethinker has had enough of this.

Freethought is thus the exact same thing as "heresy," which comes from the Greek word for "choice." It is what Orwell called Thoughtcrime. Listen, young lady, the Church will tell you what to think. What? You dare decide for yourself what to believe?" That's right, choosing for yourself what to think is heresy. It is Freethought.

Freethinkers are often characterized (accurately) as holding eccentric opinions. This may be because they are weirdoes like Dale Gribble. I have known more than a few. Conspiracy theorists of various stripes. Having rejected majority beliefs, it's open season. The sky's the limit! Anything and everything rushes in to fill the vacuum. The problem with such poor souls is that they do not yet know how to evaluate evidence and arguments in a genuinely critical manner. They didn't when they accepted orthodox dogma lock, stock, and barrel. And they didn't necessarily know any better when they exited their religion. As a result, they buy into the next thing with the same uncritical enthusiasm. They may not have thought their way out of religion so much as felt their way out.

But there may be more than one reason someone is found to embrace opinions outside the mainstream. As an advocate of the theory that there was no historical Jesus, I get "my fair share of abuse." Take a look at what Bart D. Ehrman says about me in his new book Did Jesus Exist? (Of course it's nothing compared to his slanderous attack on Earl Doherty! Professor Ehrman must be hoping Doherty, author of Jesus: Neither God nor Man) is not in a suing mood.) I am there painted as a blatant thought-criminal. The vast majority of New Testament scholars do not take my view. That could be for a couple of reasons. Maybe my foolishness if evident to anyone with a brain. Or it just might have something to do with the fact that the large majority of biblical scholars are still Christian believers, even if of only a liberal stripe. I don't want to commit the genetic fallacy or the ad hominem fallacy here. I can't read their minds. I am only saying that their faith and their need to appeal to a historical Jesus to support their views might have something to do with it. You really have to examine the issues for yourself.

Same thing with the political dogma of Global Warming or Climate Change (a rebranding much like today's Theistic Evolutionists hiding behind fancy new labels like "Evolutionary Creation" and "BioLogos"). I am not going to take for granted that the mass of supposed experts are right, when they have been wrong before (Nuclear Winter, Global Cooling, etc.). I go no farther than being suspicious, though, since, if I wanted to have a definite position on the question, I would have to take my own advice and do the research for myself. Otherwise I could not just take the word of either side. And I do not have sufficient time or interest to pursue the matter. If you do, good luck. But I am not going to treat any of these matters like a game of Family Feud: "Survey says…"

And this brings me to the main point I wanted to make. If you are genuinely free in your thought, not a dogmatist, you have to (theoretically) keep all questions open. You have to allow freedom to ask even the unaskable questions. Freethought is a matter of what boxes you are willing or unwilling to think outside of. I must admit that, knowing what I know of the claims and credentials of religion, it is hard for me to see how someone could take the opposite views. Having been one of them, I must suspect that apologists for Bible accuracy and inspiration are slanting the facts and care only to rationalize beliefs they hold on other, nonrational grounds. But it is I who am less than a Freethinker if I assume automatically that no one can arrive at very different views from mine by way of free thought and fair considerations. It remains true that honest minds differ. Who knows what factors limit our horizons of inquiry? Catechism? Social class? Vested interests? Ultimately you can't be totally objective, though we do have to try our best to spot our biases and free our thinking from them just as we have freed it from religious bullying and threats of hell.

I was privileged to know Clark H. Pinnock, an Evangelical theologian and a New Testament Ph.D. (he studied under F.F. Bruce). Pinnock was intellectually fearless. He said what he thought no matter whom he alienated.  He was not afraid to change his mind publicly. He was one of the original rabble rousers who engineered the fundamentalist coup in the Southern Baptist Convention, yet he was later almost expelled by the Evangelical Theology Society. This man, I am sure, freely thought his way to his orthodox Christian beliefs and never saw sufficient reason to change them. I did not agree with his views, but it does not occur to me to question his intellectual honesty. I am familiar with his writings, and it is readily apparent that their author was struggling honestly with every issue he faced. If I don't allow for that, it seems to me I am no Freethinker.

I have gradually come to see questions on which, in retrospect, my thinking was not as free as I once thought and hoped. I do not have the right to make my own opinions, no matter how inductively derived, into dogmas from which I refuse henceforth to budge. That would be too easy, too convenient. It would be cheapthought, not freethought. If I do not keep an open mind, I am no Freethinker.

So says Zarathustra.