In Ratione Speramus
Brown Freethought is dedicated to promoting and defending reason, science and freedom of inquiry in education, freethought, secular humanism, skepticism, secularism, philosophical naturalism, rationalism, and atheism at Brown University.
What Is Freethought?
Freethought is a worldview that beliefs about reality should be based in rationality and science, not in tradition, authority, or dogma. Freethinkers try to objectively look at claims before accepting or rejecting them. As Bertrand Russell put it in "The Value of Free Thought":
What makes a freethinker is not his beliefs, but the way in which he holds them. If he holds them because his elders told him they were true when he was young, or if he holds them because if he did not he would be unhappy, his thought is not free; but if he holds them because, after careful thought he finds a balance of evidence in their favor, then his thought is free, however odd his conclusions may seem.
Freethought as a movement dates back to the enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century and the beginning of modern religious skepticism. It has continued through the years and has helped to bring about our current secular environment.
An umbrella term for this general movement is hard to find. There are many different terms for branches within it: nontheism, scientific skepticism, secular humanism, atheism, secularism, and agnosticism. Each branch focuses on different issues and devising a catch-all name has been notoriously difficult. A famous attempt to re-brand the movement as the Brights movement has more or less failed. We therefore chose Freethought as our banner, because of it's intellectual history and that all branches of the movements are built upon the concept of freethought.
