The collection plate versus the bottle
DALE DEBAKCSY recounts the sorry tale of the persecution of the Washingtonian Temperance Society ONE night in 1840, six men sat in a pub and decided to create an institution based on the radical idea...
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The evil genius of modern Baptists
DALE DEBAKCY examines the descent into ‘shambling self-parody’ of a religious movement founded on concern for equality and intellectual freedom In the roll call of modern religious grotesqueries, few...
View ArticleFreethinking about Jesus the Nazarene
The ‘Messiah’ was nothing more than a deluded religious fanatic who arranged his own arrest, trial, crucifixion and resurrection. The May 2000 issue of the Freethinker carried a critical review of my...
View ArticleOp-ed: Learning some actual history
There was much outrage in the US last week when first-term Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, above, compared the camps on the US border with Mexico, where would-be immigrants are...
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Image of the week: the Freethinker on the British Humanist Association, 1967
The National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK), and associated organisations and individuals, have had a mixed relationship over the last century and a quarter....
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Secularism and the limits of progress?
Patrick J. Corbeil, Empire and Progress in the Victorian Secularist Movement: Imagining a Secular World (Palgrave Macmillan) • 2 December 2021 • pp 198 Image provided by Palgrave MAcmillan We live...
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Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict
The Temple Mount, Jerusalem. IMage credit: Avraham Graicer, via Wikimedia Commons In July, President Joe Biden is likely to visit Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the two countries draw closer towards...
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‘Vivesini’– a new rationalist film from India
Vivesini: Poster. Copyright Laburnum Productions 2022. Readers of the Freethinker are cordially invited to a closed private screening of Vivesini, a new rationalist film by Laburnum Productions, a...
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History Month at the Freethinker
Front window of Leicester’s Secular Hall (opened April 1881), with Freethinker poster. Image: E. Park September is History Month at the Freethinker. We shall be publishing articles that consider...
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Freethought and birth control: the untold story of a Victorian book depot
This article was first given as a paper at ‘Freethought in the Long Nineteenth Century’, a conference held at Queen Mary University of London on 9-10 September 2022. Victorian Birth Control appliances...
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Is all publicity good publicity? How the first editor of the Freethinker...
G.W. Foote, portrait in the SEcular Chronicle, 1878 In an early Freethinker editorial, George W. Foote commented that ‘The public now-a-days is in a great hurry, you must attract its attention before...
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Image of the Week: the Artemision Bronze
The Artemision Bronze, thought to be Zeus or Poseidon, c. 460 BC, at the National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Some gods are just cooler than others. IMage: E. Park The post Image of the Week: the...
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The rediscovery of cremation in Italy and Germany
The first official cremation in Italy, at the Cimitero Maggiore, Milan. L’Illustrazione Italiana 14 (1876), 212. In January 1876, an unprecedented event took place at Milan’s Cimitero Maggiore:...
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Charles Bradlaugh and George Jacob Holyoake: their contrasting reputations as...
Originally given as a paper to the Leicester Secular Society, 11 September 2022 George Jacob HOlyoake and Charles Bradlaugh when young. Introduction Bradlaugh and Holyoake were the two men under whose...
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Freethought in the 21st century: the Freethinker in conversation with Liberas
How might the history of freethought inspire its development in the 21st century? I was recently interviewed by Christoph De Spiegeleer via Zoom about the history of freethought and open enquiry and...
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Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine
This is an edited version of a paper originally given at Freethought in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Perspectives, a conference at Queen Mary University of London, on 9 September 2022. Thomas...
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Humanists and ethical reform in mid-twentieth-century Britain
Bertrand Russell in 1957. Image: Fotograaf Onbekend / Anefo via Wikimedia Commons. Humanists contributed immeasurably to ethical debates in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Relatively small in...
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‘The real beauty comes from contemplating the universe’: humanism with Sarah...
Humanly Possible, by Sarah Bakewell. Image: Chatto & Windus 2023. Sarah Bakewell is what you might call a non-organised humanist. That is not to say she is disorganised (far from it), but that she...
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‘There is nothing easy or empty about humanity and reason’: in memoriam Jim...
Centenary celebrations at the Freethinker, July 1981, with Jim Herrick centre. Photograph by Barry Duke, editor of the Freethinker from 1998–January 2022. page copyright: Freethinker (1981). Life...
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Books From Bob’s Library #1: Introduction and Thomas Paine’s ‘The Age of Reason’
Introducing Books From Bob’s Library, a semi-regular series in which freethought book collector and National Secular Society historian Bob Forder delves into his extensive collection and shares stories...
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