Why is a pansy, a flower that seems to ponder, the emblem of freethinkers?
Freethinkers chose the pansy as their badge because its name comes from the French pensée, thought, and in late summer the flower droops forward as if lost in contemplation. Bertrand Russell added a twist: rejecting religion does not make you a freethinker, and a believer can be one.
Freethought is a movement built on forming beliefs independently of authority, tradition, revelation or dogma. The word appeared in the seventeenth century for people who questioned beliefs usually accepted without scrutiny. Today it is most associated with agnosticism, deism, secularism, humanism and criticism of religion, and freethinkers generally insist that a claim must be testable, verifiable and logical before it counts as true. The atheist writer Adam Lee describes it as a broader umbrella than atheism, sheltering religious dissent, scepticism and unconventional thinking of many kinds.
A key text came in the 1870s from the British mathematician William Kingdon Clifford, whose essay The Ethics of Belief argued it is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence. It became a rallying cry, and Clifford organised the Congress of Liberal Thinkers in 1878. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many freethinkers were deists, holding that God could be understood only by studying nature, not revelation; opponents treated deism as almost as scandalous as atheism.
Russell's 1944 essay The Value of Free Thought defined a freethinker by method rather than conclusion: someone whose views rest on evidence, free of tradition and the tyranny of their own passions. By that test, he argued, a dogmatic atheist might fail. He compared Stalin to a pope presiding over a church of dialectical materialism that suppressed free discussion. Fred Edwords of the American Humanist Association has noted that Russell's standard would include liberal believers who challenged orthodoxy.
Modern freethinkers claim a long ancestry, from critical thought in ancient Greece and the unorthodox verse of Omar Khayyam to the Renaissance. The pansy symbol itself spread from France, Belgium, Spain and Sweden before American secularists adopted it in the 1880s as an emblem of freedom of conscience.
Source: Freethought
