The Muddled Thinking Of The Self-Declared "Free Thinkers"

The online magazine, Religion Dispatches isn't a place I regularly choose to go.  Far from being a magazine about religion - what I gather is its pretense for being - it's a forum for slamming religion, a gathering place for atheist trolls.  If there's one thing I have come to not find edifying  or terribly important it's going over the same old hoary, threadbare atheist tropes that are seldom based on real history, real science or rational thinking. 

Anyway, I went there the other day and, from there, took another look at the "Freedom From Religion Foundation", essentially a family business founded in Madison Wisconsin that is now run by the founder's daughter and son-in-law.   Looking them up, not wanting to spend that much time on it, on that "encyclopedia" where you can pretty surely bet such figures write their own biographies, Wikipedia, this jumped out at me.

Barker is co-host of Freethought Radio, a radio program based in Madison, Wisconsin radio station WXXM for atheists, agnostics, and other freethinkers that has included interviews with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Julia Sweeney, and Michael Newdow.

Calling such a program "Freethought Radio" as a fundraising-group calling materialist-scientistic-atheists "free thinkers" is a consumer fraud because of that list of guests Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and I'm pretty sure Sam Harris, couldn't be "free thinkers" because, as materialists, they don't believe that free thought exists.   I doubt anyone has ever said anything more dismissive of the possibility of free thought than Richard Dawkins is infamous for having said, reducing human beings and all other animals to "lumbering robots" controlled by our genes,  Pinker, as well. 

Any atheist who is a materialist, I would go so far as to say anyone who believes in and promotes any materialist ideology, whether it goes by such euphemisms as "naturalism" or "physicalism" would have to be entirely untrue to their ideology, in gross violation of reason (atheists love to claim they own reason, man!*)  or a downright liar to claim to have anything to do with "free thought" or "free thinking" or even the possibility of those. 

Atheism is not an ideology of free thought, it is a denial of the possibility of what you have to believe in to believe free thought is possible.  Atheism which is wedded to materialist-scientism can't believe in free thought because in order for minds to be free to think freely, they could not be bound up in material causation, whether genetic - on a molecular level - or even an "emergent" level that would still be determined by the material components their faith must hold is the basis of it because that's all there is and material forces acting in regular order is all that could govern that.

Minds to be free would have to be free of physical causation or they could not be free.  And if they are not free, everything minds do would have to be no more significant than any other physical phenomena, iron rusting, ice forming or melting, gas dispersing.   Reason would have to fade into the same banal insignificance as any of those, I'm pretty sure that if thought out to its logical conclusion, even the concept of significance or information probably even logic, itself, would fall to the overall program of nihilistic denial of the significance of thought which is inevitably necessitated by atheist, materialist ideology.

The founder and prime mover of the Freedom From Religion Foundation was one of those people who went to college and was told that religion was the root of all evil and she believed religion was the primary reason for the oppression of women.  I am pretty well convinced her hatred of religion was far more a product of, at first, irrationality and ignorance of history than anything to do with reason or knowledge.  That she would promote atheist-materialism as a substitute, something that would have no power within it to promote the equality of women, their rights, even as it contained everything that would lead men to feel entirely free, without any moral restraint, to discriminate and use women in any way they wanted to is certainly not a testament to her intellectual rigor, nor that of her daughter or son-in-law.   I wonder what she would have thought of the pronouncements about women of her fellow atheists such as the misogynistic rants of Richard Dawkins (who the FFRF has honored and given an award) and the blog presence ThunderF00t, not to mention so many of  the other "Bright" lights of organized atheism.  Sure, I'm sure most of them would be OK with abortion (though, well, I don't have time to go into Nat Hentoff (lauded at the FFRF website) and other atheist anti-choicers) but I'm sure lots of them would feel they were free to treat women any way they wanted to because along with everything else atheism obliterates, it is the idea that there is a real, morally binding obligation to act justly, treating people as if they are made in the Image of God.  As the passage from Marilynne Robinson I posted the other day pointed out, that's something that is mentioned in the Bible as early as Genesis 9.  I'd think it was indicated even earlier, when God told Cain that he would not be killed for murdering his brother.  But that's no where to be found in materialism because People are just things in materialism, with no more rights or right to justice than any random rock or one of the myriad of springtails you'd have to step on to walk in the snow.

Freedom?  Thought?   No, I suspect they're mostly in it for the money and the guest appearances on TV and radio shows, and podcasts.


*  Here's the Freedom From Religion Foundations' pitch for the holiday season:

The commentator at Religion Dispatches who compared the FFRF to the worst of TV huckster pseudo-Christians was pretty much spot on.

Update:  No, I got tired of Nat Hentoff's egomaniacal, self-righteous, asinine song and dance when I had a subscription to The Progressive (also based in Madison).   I don't remember specifically it was that which led me to drop the subscription, there being other things wrong with the rag which, like so many other lefty rags were devoted to talking people into imbibing ballot box poison, but it was part of it.

The lefty magazines of that era and, to some extent today, were full of that crap.   Hentoff was an ass.

Update:  Apparently Freedom From Religion doesn't believe in fair use of content from their website, perhaps especially from critics of their corporate content.  I'll leave the broken link up because it contains the words of their self-contradictory slogan.