Saturday Night For The Freethinker Christopher Hitchens

“THE VALUE OF HETERODOXY”

‘It matters not what you think,’ Hitchens wrote, ‘but how you think.’ Many assume Hitchens was such a pugnacious debater and polemicist because he was temperamentally inclined toward rhetorical combat. As Amis put it: ‘He likes the battle, the argument, the smell of cordite.’ This is true, but another source of Hitchens’s ferocity in print and on the stage was the fact that his positions were natural extensions of his core principles. It is easier to hold and defend a controversial position when you have internally coherent reasons for doing so.

What you think – or at least what you purport to think – tends to matter more than how you think these days. The best path toward a lucrative career as a political or cultural commentator is the development of a brand that serves a particular set of information consumers. There are plenty of fiery pundits and Twitter warriors out there today, but how many reliably outrage and alienate their own ‘side’? How many are willing to publish an article or a podcast that will result in a loss of followers and prestige within the group?

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Anything Goes On Sunday

Saturday Night For The Free Thinkers

Why aren’t most people free thinkers?

Because people like structure and to think within a structure. Free thinking is therefore outside the norm, which can bring on isolation or criticism, or misunderstanding. Most people don’t want to be different from others, even if free thinking is probably good for progress overall.

I Believe In Evidence

“Don’t you believe in anything?” Isaac Asimov said, “I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers”.

“Organized” religion, “des-organized” religion: sects and cults, have been created by humans throughout millennia. As humans evolved from small hunter-gatherer tribes into large agrarian cultures, our ancestors needed to encourage cooperation and tolerance among relative strangers. Religion then—along with the belief in a moralizing God—was a cultural adaptation to these challenges.

The Freethinker

Saturday Night For The Freethinker Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry was born in Chicago in 1930, the daughter of civil rights activists and intellectuals. Her play, “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway and winner of the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, was loosely based on her own experiences. When she was 8, her parents bought a house in a white neighborhood, where Lorraine witnessed a racist mob and her parents’ resulting civil rights case.

She studied at the University of Wisconsin for two years, then moved to New York to become a writer, working as an associate editor of Paul Robeson’s “Freedom.” She married Robert Nemiroff in 1953, whom she met on the picket line while protesting discrimination at New York University. Hansberry divorced her husband in 1964.

Hansberry selected the title of her play from a line in a poem by Langston Hughes: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun, Or does it explode?” Sidney Poitier starred in both the play and film versions. The play’s central protagonist is Beneatha, an eager young woman determined to fight social convention and go to medical school. Beneatha is a “self-avowed” atheist (who gets slapped by her mother for admitting it).

Hansberry wrote “The Drinking Gourd,” commissioned by the National Broadcasting Co., in 1959. About the American slave trade, it was considered too hot for television and was never produced. Her play, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” (1964), was about a Jewish intellectual. It played on Broadway while Hansberry was hospitalized for cancer that cut her life short at age 34. “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” was posthumously adapted from her writings and was produced off-Broadway in 1969, also appearing in book form (1970). D.1965.

Source: https://ffrf.org/news/day/19/05/freethought/…

Saturday Night For The Freethinker: Albert Einstein

Einstein would probably not have classified himself as a freethinker in the sense in which it is used in this movement. He probably would not have supported all the positions taken in the Freethinker. However, he puts an absolute priority on the need for all of us to think independently of established ideas. This is how he overthrew Newtonian physics.

Saturday Night For The Freethinker: Sharing Thoughts To Reach Out

Saturday Night For The Freethinker: What Is Free Thinking?

A freee thinking mind understands that what one might consider a problem, another could call a solution.

A free thinker is not afraid of being called ‘different’

Free–thinkers are confident, logical and intelligent. They give birth to their own ideas and resist the dominating mantras of the simple-minded.

Free-thinkers engage in creative thinking on many levels. Socially, emotionally, logically and spiritually.

CRITICAL THINKING

Saturday Night For The Freethinker: Humor Today A Cat Thinking For Himself

What the cat is thinking: “The joke’s on you Schrodinger, I got two boxes!“