Authority or Thought

To say that one shall believe on authority, without questioning the title of that authority, is to say that one shall not reason, shall not think. One cannot well help thinking sometimes.

Elizur Wright (1804-1885) is remembered not as a freethinker but as the “father of life insurance.”  Wright was an actuarial mathematician who was a Professor of Mathematics at Western Reserve College in Ohio in 1829, when he became interested in the science behind insurance. Wright was also an abolitionist and a co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. This is what he had to say about religion and politics in 1877, at the New York Freethinker’s Association’s annual convention at Watkins Glen, NY:

CREED RELIGIONS AS CULTIVATORS OF POLITICAL HYPOCRISY  

By political hypocrisy I mean professing to be a Republican or a Democrat without regarding the rights of other people as equal to one’s own—not doing as one would be done by. Now by creed religions I mean associations of people who undertake, by pains and penalties, to compel belief in regard to supernatural persons and a state of existence after death. With creed in itself I have no quarrel. A man who believes nothing is good for nothing. Faith is not a matter of will, still less a thing to be enforced by fear; it naturally follows after evidence, and often takes, and must take, its evidence at second hand; that is, believe on authority. The difference between politics and religion as to creed is, that the former regards only natural men in this world, where evidence is attainable at first hand. The latter regards beings or things above and beyond the senses, of which the evidence, at least for common mortals, is at second hand or resting on authority, and which is often beyond comprehension. To say that one shall believe on authority, without questioning the title of that authority, is to say that one shall not reason, shall not think. One cannot well help thinking sometimes.

D. M. Bennett, The Proceedings and Addresses at the Freethinkers’ Convention Held at Watkins, N.Y., 1878.  p. 377