Günther Anders (1902) It was on this date, July 12, 1902, that Austrian philosopher Günther Anders, originally Günther Siegmund Stern, was born in Breslau, the offspring of Clara and William Stern, founders of child psychology. An assimilated Jewish intellectual, he found that there were too many writers using the name Stern, so his editor suggested […]

Henry David Thoreau (1817) It was on this date, July 12, 1817, the writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts. He graduated Harvard in 1837 and discovered a talent for writing about nature. Thoreau embraced the Transcendentalist belief in personal insight and experience, but he was neither a critical nor a […]

“The most preposterous notion that H. Sapiens has dreamed up is that the Lord God … wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures…. Yet this absurd fantasy … pays all the expenses of the … least productive industry in all history.”

Supernatural entities simply do not exist... [O]ur cosmos does not possess a supernatural and eternal God... As science advances, belief in divine miracles and the efficacy of prayer becomes fainter and fainter.

“Christian religion ... has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. ... Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear.”

"Apart from moral conduct," Kant wrote, "all that man thinks himself able to do in order to become acceptable to God is mere superstition and religious folly."

Hobbes opposed any positive revealed religion, including Christianity and he was neither the first nor the last freethinker to hide the light of skepticism under the bushel of belief.

Descartes reasoned from the principle that nothing can be believed to be true until it is evidently true. The only assumption he would allow was his own existence: I think, therefore I am.

“Is it not a fact that in the very countries in which the Church holds an undisputed sway and no freedom of thought is tolerated, a very much lower standard of morality prevails?”

Plato and Aristotle had only one thing in common: they had very few followers in their time. To his credit, Aristotle rejected the idea of personal immortality and of a personal God.