noun
definition
A person who has formed their opinions using reason and rational enquiry; somebody who has rejected dogma, especially with regard to religion.
Examples of freethinker in a Sentence
Here he had to encounter bitter opposition from the orthodox clergy and their followers, among whom he was regarded as a freethinker.
In Persia at the present day a Safi is much the same as a freethinker?
No; the great freethinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity.
Although some of his quatrains are purely mystic and pantheistic, most of them bear quite another stamp; they are the breviary of a radical freethinker, who protests in the most forcible manner both against the narrowness, bigotry and uncompromising austerity of the orthodox ulema and the eccentricity, hypocrisy and wild ravings of advanced Sufis, whom he successfully combats with their own weapons, using the whole mystic terminology simply to ridicule mysticism itself.
The Lay Monastery, the Censor, the Freethinker, the Plain Dealer, the Champion, and other works of the same kind had had their short day.
As a nickname the term "agnostic" was soon misused to cover any and every variation of scepticism, and just as popular preachers confused it with atheism in their denunciations, so the callow freethinker - following Tennyson's path of "honest doubt" - classed himself with the agnostics, even while he combined an instinctively Christian theism with a facile rejection of the historical evidences for Christianity.
As to her " supranormal " faculties, a matter concerning which belief largely depends on the point of view, it is to be remarked that Quicherat, a freethinker wholly devoid of clerical influences, admits them (Apercus nouveaux, 1850), saying that the evidence is as good as for any facts in her history.
Though the excellence of his work as agent-general in the years 1780-86 was fully acknowledged, and earned him a special gift of 31,000 livres, yet he did not gain a bishopric until the beginning of the year 1789, probably because the king disliked him as a freethinker.
In addition to the difficulties presented by the Bible as an historical record, and the literary problems which textual and other critics have investigated, the modern freethinker denies that the Christianity of the New Testament or its interpretation by modern theologians affords a coherent theory of human life and duty.
He himself was not only a Huguenot, but a freethinker, and had made unsparing use of his sharp wit in epigrams on the Church and on the government.
In the 3rd century, Hierocles endeavoured to prove that the doctrines and the life of Apollonius were more valuable than those of Christ, and, in modern times, Voltaire and Charles Blount (1654-1693), the English freethinker, have adopted a similar standpoint.
Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise, is a novel written in letters describing the loves of a man of low position and a girl of rank, her subsequent marriage to a respectable freethinker of her own station, the mental agonies of her lover, and the partial appeasing of the distresses of the lovers by the influence of noble sentiment and the good offices of a philanthropic Englishman.
He certainly was no mere advocate of orthodoxy; he as certainly was no mere victim of terror at scepticism; least of all was he a freethinker in disguise.
She had become an ardent freethinker, and shortly afterwards she was prosecuted and convicted, together with Charles Bradlaugh, for publishing " blasphemous " literature.