{"id":38795116,"date":"2006-01-30T06:16:56","date_gmt":"2006-01-30T06:16:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.casey.com\/2006\/01\/freethinkers.html"},"modified":"2013-04-05T06:32:55","modified_gmt":"2013-04-05T06:32:55","slug":"200601freethinkers-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/2006\/01\/30\/200601freethinkers-html\/","title":{"rendered":"Freethinkers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last September I read a book called What’s God Got to Do With It?<\/a> that introduced me to the life and writings of Robert Ingersoll, a famous politician and orator of the late 1800s who was an advocate of secular government and a leader among those who described themselves as Freethinkers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I enjoyed that book very much, and started searching for more on the same subject matter. Ingersoll left a voluminous written legacy, and I considered digging more deeply into his works. But my searching led to to a broader view of the subject that appealed to me, Freethinkers; A History of American Secularism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Everywhere you look in America today, the religious-right is working to inject religion into government. George’s Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives<\/a>, and efforts to teach “Intelligent Design” in classrooms, are but a few examples.<\/p>\n

Frequently, proponents of such change argue that attempts to separate church and state go much farther than our founding father’s originally intended. Freethinkers<\/i> is a fascinating history of that reveals what a monumental accomplishment it was for America’s founders too succeed at creating a secular government, and traces the role of freethought through wartime, the woman’s and civil rights movements, and up to the present day, that I heartily recommend to anyone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last September I read a book called What’s God Got to Do With It? that introduced me to the life and writings of Robert Ingersoll, a famous politician and orator of the late 1800s who was an advocate of secular government and a leader among those …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38795116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3mOvc-2CMnG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38795116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38795116"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38795116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173354152,"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38795116\/revisions\/173354152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38795116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38795116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casey.life\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38795116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}