HUMANISTS UK - 19th CENTURY FREE THINKERS
The first thing I want to mention here is that if you research the words "Free Thinkers" you will find that a number of groups do currently use these words to describe themselves including some people we would think of as anti-Democrat politically. We have to be careful to eliminate those more contemporary groups when looking at the world that George Eliot, G.H. Lewes, and others inhabited in the 19th Century Europe. Actually, when I tripped across these anti-Democratic types on the Internet and saw what they advocate for, I thought they opposed what the 19th century group was for!
I encourage you to read this article, which explains.
Excerpt: Humanist thinking developed rapidly in the nineteenth century because it was closely associated with new scientific thinking and discoveries. Darwin's ideas, and new biblical research and scholarship coming from Germany, provoked a crisis of faith in many Victorian intellectuals, movingly evoked in Matthew Arnold's famous poem Dover Beach, Darwin's defender T.H. Huxley coined the word "agnostic" to describe his belief that there were things that we could not possibly know.
The Positivist movement of Auguste Comte put forward a personal and humanistic religion, and was fashionable and profoundly influential for several decades. The German theologian and philosopher Feuerbach attacked conventional Christianity in a book translated by Mary Ann Evans/George Eliot as "The Essence of Christianity" (1854), and suggested that religion was "the dream of the human mind", projecting onto an illusory god our own ideals and nature. German scholarship also demonstrated that the books of the Bible were fallible human constructions, not divine revelation.
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