Tag: The Freethinker

  • We’re allowed

    Here’s my column in The Freethinker.

    It’s about all this inquisitioning going on.

    Remember the Inquisition? Those were fun times.

    Being alive now is being subject to a roving freelance Inquisition that can grab us at any time, as if we were 13th century Cathars. I feel pretty safe where I am, but with a freelance Inquisition one just never knows. If they did pounce, and pause to question me as opposed to opening fire on sight, I would be guilty on so many charges. Everyone I know would be. We all break the rules of obedience and submission every minute of every day.

    Those people in Paris broke so many of those rules. They were out in public in mixed company – women and men together, as if all of Paris were a giant whorehouse. They were having a good time instead of knocking their heads on the ground. They were drinking and eating, they were listening to music, they were watching half-naked men kick a ball around. They were doing it in Paris, home of pagans and crusaders – and of blasphemers, anti-clericals, enlighteners, thinkers, talkers.

    They were doing things we get to do. We’re allowed to go out, we’re allowed to have fun, we’re allowed to eat and drink and get giddy at concerts. We’re also allowed to blaspheme and to resist the clerics.

     

  • New Atheists since 1881

    Also – I have a new gig. I get to be a columnist for The Freethinker.

    Cutting”, “abrasive”, “sarcastic”, “offensive” … These are just some of the words used to describe the Freethinker magazine, which was launched in Britain in 1881 and has continued publishing without a break ever since. But it was the word “blasphemous”, dropped from the lips of a hostile judge, that that got its founder and first editor G.W. Foote into serious trouble. As a result mainly of irreligious cartoons published in the Christmas, 1882, edition, the judge declared the issue “blasphemous” and Foote was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment with hard labour. GW Foote

    But the magazine, under caretaker editor Edward E Aveling, kept rolling off the presses, to the chagrin of the Home Office and the police, and to the delight of a growing number of readers who could hardly believe that any magazine in respectable, Victorian England, would dare attack religion in such an aggressive manner.

    In issue 1 of the Freethinker (May, 1881) Foote wrote:

    The Freethinker is an anti-Christian organ, and must therefore be chiefly aggressive. It will wage relentless war against Superstition in general, and against Christian Superstition in particular. It will do its best to employ the resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation; and it will not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that may be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense.

    Ever since, the Freethinker has remained faithful to Foote’s founding principles, and has never wavered in its opposition to religion.

    Good, eh?