"A History of Freedom of Thought" by John Bagnell Bury

• A man can never be hindered from thinking whatever he chooses so long as he conceals what he thinks.
• It has taken centuries to persuade the most enlightened peoples that liberty to publish one's opinions and to discuss all questions is a good and not a bad thing.
• The average brain is naturally lazy and tends to take the line of least resistance. The mental world of the ordinary man consists of beliefs which he has accepted without questioning and to which he is firmly attached; he is instinctively hostile to anything which would upset the established order of this familiar world. A new, idea, inconsistent with some of the beliefs which he holds, means the necessity of rearranging his mind; and this process is laborious, requiring a painful expenditure of brain energy. To him and his fellows, who form the vast majority, new idea, and opinions which cast doubt on established beliefs and institutions, seem evil because they are disagreeable.
• The psychological motives which produce a conservative spirit hostile to new ideas are reinforced by the active opposition of certain powerful sections of the community, such as a class, a caste, or a priesthood, whose interests are bound up with the maintenance of the established order and the ideas on which it rests.
• If you ask somebody how he knows something, he may say, “I have it on good authority,” or, “I read it in a book,” or, “It is a matter of common knowledge,” or, “I learned it at school.” Any of these replies means that he has accepted information from others, trusting in their knowledge without verifying their statements or thinking the matter out for himself. And the greater part of most men’s knowledge and beliefs is of this kind, taken without verification from their parents, teachers, acquaintances, books, newspapers.
• It is obvious that every one’s knowledge would be very limited indeed, if we were not justified in accepting facts on the authority of others. But we are justified only under one condition. The facts which we can safely accept must be capable of demonstration or verification.
• Reason’s only weapon has been argument. Authority has employed physical and moral violence, legal coercion and social displeasure.
• The burden of proof does not lie upon the rejecter.
• The history of European science and European philosophy beings in Ionia.
• When a man is acquainted only with the habits of his own countrymen they seem so much a matter of course that he ascribes them to nature, but when he travels abroad and finds totally different habits and standards of conduct prevailing, he beings to understand the power of custom; and learns that morality and religion are matters of latitude.
• He stated the theological difficulty as to the origin of evil in this for: God either wishes to abolish evil and cannot, or can and will not, or neither can nor will, or both can and will. The first three are unthinkable, if he is a God worthy of the name; therefore the last alternative must be true. Why then does evil exist? The inference is that there is no God, in the sense of a governor of the world.
• During the two centuries in which they had been a forbidden sect the Christians had claimed toleration on the ground that religious belief is voluntary and not a thing which can be enforced. When their faith became the predominant creed and had the power of the State behind it, they abandoned this view. They embarked on the hopeful enterprise of bringing about a complete uniformity in men’s opinions on the mysteries of the universe, and began a more or less definite policy of coercing thought.
• One of the most efficacious means for hunting down heresy was the “Edict of Faith,” which enlisted the people in the service of the Inquisition and required every man to be an informer.
• The process employed in the trials of those accused of heresy in Spain rejected every reasonable means for the ascertainment of truth. The prisoner was assumed to be guilty, the burden of proving his innocence rested on him; his judge was virtually his prosecutor. All witnesses against him, however in famous, were admitted. The rules for allowing witnesses for the prosecution were lax; those for rejecting witnesses for the defence were rigid.
• The principle on which the Inquisition proceeded was that better a hundred innocent should suffer than one guilty person escape.
• The firm belief in witchcraft, magic, and demons was inherited by the Middle Ages from antiquity, but it became far more lurid and made the world terrible.
• Some of the early Christian Emperors legislated against magic, but till the fourteenth century there was no systematic attempt to root out witchcraft.
• The fearful epidemic, known as the Black Death, which devastated Europe in that century, seems to have aggravated the haunting terror of the invisible world of demons. Trials for witchcraft multiplied, and for three hundred years the discovery of witchcraft and the destruction of those who were accused of practicing it, chiefly women, was a standing feature of European civilization.
• No story is more painful than the persecution of witches, and nowhere was it more atrocious than in England and Scotland. I mention it because it was the direct result of theological doctrines, and because, as we shall see, it was traditionalism which brought the long chapter of horrors to an end.
• The intellectual and social movement which was to dispel the darkness of the Middle Ages and prepare the way for those who would ultimately deliver reason from her prison, began in Italy in the thirteenth century.
• What Humanism did in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, at first in Italy, than in other countries, was to create an intellectual atmosphere in which the emancipation of reason could begin and knowledge could resume its progress. The period saw the invention of printing and the discovery of new parts of the globe, and these things were to aid powerfully in the future defeat of authority.
• The principle cause of the Reformation was the general corruption of the Church and the flagrancy of its oppression. For a long time the Papacy had had no higher aim than to be a secular power exploiting its spiritual authority for the purpose of promoting its worldly interest, by which it was exclusively governed.
• The Renaissance age saw the first signs of the beginning of modern science, but the medieval prejudices against the investigation of nature were not dissipated till the seventeenth century, and in Italy they continued to a much later period.
• The history of modern astronomy begins in 1543, with the publication of the work of Copernicus revealing the truth about the motions of the earth. The appearance of this work is important in the history of freethought, because it raised a clear and definite issue between science and Scripture; and Osiander, who edited it (Copernicus was dying), foreseeing the outcry it would raise, stated untruly in the preface that the earth’s motion was put forward only as a hypothesis.
• The observations of the Italian astronomer Galileo de’ Galilei demonstrated the Copernican theory beyond question.
• Nowhere did the Press become really free till the nineteenth century.
• Religious liberty was an important step towards complete freedom of opinion.
• Toleration means incomplete religious liberty, and there are many degrees of it.
• The religious liberty now enjoyed in Western lands has been gained through various stages of toleration.
• Religion is a curse if persecution is a necessary part of it.
• It must be added that in Maryland and a few southern States atheists still suffer from some political disabilities.
• For knowledge is advanced through the utterance of new opinions, and truth is discovered by free discussion.
• The achievement of religious liberty in England in the nineteenth century had been mainly the work of Liberals.
• During the last three hundred years reason has been slowly but steadily destroying Christian mythology and exposing the pretensions of supernatural revelation.
• It should be observed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries atheist was used in the wildest way as a term of abuse for freethinkers, and when we read of atheists we may generally assume that the persons so stigmatized were really deists, that is, they believed in a personal God but not in Revelation.
• No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.
• Modern science, heralded by the researches of Copernicus, was founded in the seventeenth century, which saw the demonstration of the Copernican theory, the discovery of gravitation, the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and the foundation of modern chemistry and physics.
• It was in the field of natural history that scientific men of the eighteenth century suffered most from the coercion of authority.
• The publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 is, therefore, a landmark not only in science but in the war between science and theology.
• It is now agreed unanimously by all who have studied the facts that the Pentateuch was put together from a number of different documents of different ages, the earliest dating from the ninth, the last from the fifth, century B.C.; and there are later minor additions.
• If existence after death were proved and became a scientific fact like the law of gravitation, a revealed religion might lose its power. For the whole point of a revealed religion is that it is not based on scientific facts.
• The agnostic holds that there are limits to human reason, and that theology lies outside those limits. Within those limits lies the world with which science (including psychology) deals.
• The difference between an agnostic and an atheist is that the atheist positively denies the existence of a personal God, the agnostic does not believe in it.
• Speaking out is an intellectual duty.
• We are ruled by the view that because compromise is necessary in politics it is also a good thing in the intellectual domain.
• If the history of civilization has any lesson to teach it is this: there is one supreme condition of mental and moral progress which it is completely within the power of man himself to secure, and that is perfect liberty of thought and discussion. The establishment of this liberty may be considered the most valuable achievement of modern civilization, and as a condition of social progress it should be deemed fundamental.
• The struggle of reason against authority has ended in what appears now to be a decisive and permanent victory for liberty. In the most civilized and progressive countries, freedom of discussion is recognized as a fundamental principle.
• It should be apart of education to explain to children, as soon as they are old enough to understand, when it is reasonable, and when it is not, to accept what they are told, on authority.