fayfreethinkers.com

Our Homepage wrote:A freethinker is someone who forms beliefs about religion and the supernatural through conscientious reflection and rational inquiry and not based upon authority or tradition. Freethinking is a method of arriving at conclusions, not a set of beliefs. Most freethinkers are agnostics, atheists, or deists.

Hogeye wrote:Or simply drop "about religion and the supernatural" from the definition we have, perhaps adding it as an addendum like the "Most freethinkers are agnostics, atheists, or deists" part.

Savonarola wrote:I agree that the concept of "freethinking" can apply to realms other than religion. However, I feel that our definition of "freethinker" is acceptable, as the term's connotation usually involves religious (dis)beliefs.

In 1879, Moses Harman moved to Valley Falls from missouri. An abolitionist and freethinker, he began a freethought journal called the Valley Falls Liberal in August, 1880, and served as the secretary of the local Liberal League in Valley Falls during the early 1880s. At this time the freethought movement included a number of anarchists. The 1891 annual meeting of the Kansas Liberal League in Ottawa, which was denounced by the Topeka State Journal as a "Free Love" gathering, was attended by Voltairine de Cleyre, and its 1894 annual meeting in Topeka demanded that Grover Cleveland "take off your crown, vacate your throne, lay down your sceptre and take yourself away from the sight of human eyes forever." Harman and his paper, from the beginning, were also concerned about many other issues besides freethought. In a prospectus published in 1880, the Liberal, in addition to endorsing the platform of the National Liberal League, pledged to "champion the rights of the poor, laboring man as against monopolists of every class."

Harman changed the paper's name to the Kansas Liberal in 1881, and moved it to Lawrence for six months in 1882, during which time it served as the organ of the Kansas Liberal Union. Because of clashes with his associates there over prohibition (which he opposed) he resumed control of the paper and moved it back to Valley Falls. The paper now began carrying more advertising offering anarchist, sex radical, and freethought books and periodicals for sale. In 1882, Edwin Cox Walker, an iowa freethinker, began writing for the Kansas Liberal, and became assistant editor in 1883. While associated with GH Walser and Liberal University in Liberal, MO, Walker developed a plan for an anarchistic economic arrangement to free them from the "ranks of capital's dependents," which, however, never came to fruition. He also contributed to Liberty, an anarchist journal published in Boston. Walker had an even more libertarian reputation than Harman, having been described by the editor of the Atchison Globe, as "a fellow so intensely liberal that he opposes the law against indecent exposure."

In August, 1883, as Harman became more interested in sex, labor, and property issues, the Liberal evolved into Lucifer, the Light-Bearer, a title described by Benjamin Tucker as "Quite the best name we know of, after Liberty!" As time went on, Lucifer became increasingly anarchistic in outlook, describing itself in 1885 as a 'weekly Anarchist-Freethought Journal." In 1887, the editor of the anarchist Kansas City Sun, writing in Liberty, said that "Liberty attacks the State, the Truth Seeker attacks the Church, the Word attacks Madam Grundy, but Lucifer is not content, in its own way, without attacking all three." - A Look at Kansas Anarchist History