Freethought Almanac

Lighting a candle in toxic air.
2011-02-22
February 22: Arthur Schopenhauer

It was Arthur Schopenhauer who said, "Religion has always been and always will be in conflict with the noble endeavor after pure truth."

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2011-02-17
February 17: Bruno Burned for His Opinions

Even the “Catholic Encyclopedia” admits, "His attitude of mind towards religious truth was that of a rationalist." To Bruno it would have been easier for him to change his sex than to change his mind.

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2011-02-15
February 15: Jeremy Bentham

"The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons everything it touches," said Bentham. "There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality."

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2011-02-02
February 2: Ayn Rand

"Religion," Rand noted, "is the first enemy of the ability to think. ...yet before they learn to think [men] are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith. Faith is the worst curse of mankind."

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2011-01-19
January 19: Auguste Comte

Comte denies metaphysics in favor of a reliance on sense experience as the source of human knowledge and denies the existence of a personal God.

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2011-01-09
January 9: Simone de Beauvoir (1908)

"I cannot be angry at God, in whom I do not believe," De Beauvoir said.

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2011-01-05
January 5: Umberto Eco

"Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth," says Eco, "for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them."

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2011-01-03
January 3: Marcus Tullius Cicero

Cicero may have adopted only a public profession of belief in immortality. “On the Nature of the Gods” gives the arguments for and against, but like a politician he takes neither side.

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2010-12-20
December 20: Sidney Hook

"As a set of cognitive beliefs, religion is a speculative hypothesis of low order of probability."

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2010-12-16
December 16: George Santayana

"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny."

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Ronald Bruce Meyer

Our Fearless Leader.


Daily Almanac

August 21: Jules Michelet

Jules Michelet (1798) It was on this date, August 21, 1798, that French historian Jules Michelet was born in Paris, into a family with a Huguenot past. Of his youth, under the post-revolutionary, reactionary French government, Michelet recalled, I remember that in the dire misfortunes of daily deprivation and fears for the future... unsure of […]



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