Richard Carlile

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Richard Carlile

The item below, celebrating Richard Carlile's birthday December 9, appeared on the Freedom From Religion website. It demonstrates how far freethinkers and atheists have come in the last century or two. As late as the 19th Century freethinkers, agnostics, atheists, and heretics were regularly charged with blasphemy and jailed - or worse, even put to death - for daring to challenge the religious orthodoxy of the day.

While we are no longer jailed for our beliefs, atheists and freethinkers are still today derided as far out of the mainstream, even immoral, for professing no religious belief. It is as if WE are the deficient ones, while those who cling to unproven, irrational beliefs are still unquestioningly accepted into society and the higher echelons of power. Someday this will change. It will be the atheists and freethinkers that will be the vast majority of the population and those that continue their supernatural belief systems will be the ones that are shunned and shut out.

This attitude was becoming common in America and in other "western" countries in the late 19th Century, but alas, another wave of religious hype and paranoia swept across the land, especially in America.

Nowadays, church attendance is plummeting. Freethinking and atheism are commonplace among those under 35 years of age, and with the continued advancement of science, and the dying off of older believers, our numbers will only grow.

I don't think that religionistas have that much to worry about, however. Even as the believers numbers shrink to tiny fractions of what they once were, we freethinkers are not going to be as petty, vindictive, or intolerant against believers as the believers were against freethinkers throughout the ages. Believers may be pitied, but they will not be prosecuted. Everyone has the right to their own mind, an idea that the believers never have quite come to grips with.

Happy Birthday, Richard Carlile

On December 9, 1790, freethinker and tireless free speech champion Richard Carlile was born in Ashburton, Devon, England. After attending charity schools, Carlile began working at age 13. In 1813, Carlile moved to London. He was jailed for selling political satires in 1817. Carlile, a freethinking deist, then published an inexpensive version of The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, and the Deist, a pioneering and popular freethinking weekly. Carlile was prosecuted for blasphemy and seditious libel in 1819 by the Society for the Suppression of Vice. He became a cause celebre during two trials in the Guildhall where he defended himself. He was convicted and sentenced to pay £1500 and spend three years in prison. Carlile's prison stay was doubled after he refused to pay the fine. He spent 1819-1825 at Dorcester prison, where he published freethought tracts with wide circulation and influence, including reprints of freethinkers such as Voltaire, Shelley, Byron and Bentham.

He took over publication of the weekly Republican, a major freethought periodical with a circulation of 4,000 to 5,000, in 1822, also from prison. Carlile's wife, Jane, and sister and many supporters were imprisoned for disseminating Carlile's tracts. A campaign, called the "war of the shopmen," continued until Carlile, his workers and vendors were released. Carlile opened up a shop to print and promote freethought literature, and teamed up with "Rev." Robert Taylor in the late 1820s, on freethought speaking tours. Together, they opened the Rotunda in London, a hub of dissent. Both men were arrested and convicted of various blasphemies in 1831. Carlile continued organizing and writing from prison, with the help of Eliza Sharples, known as "Isis," who became his common law wife (or "moral mistress") after he separated from his first wife. Carlile spent more than a decade of his life in prison. Carlile's gallant fight was "the greatest fight ever waged for a free press and free speech," according to freethought biographer Joseph McCabe, lessening future prosecutions. His influence and cachet with other reformers gradually diminished and his final years were spent in great poverty. He is remembered for his pioneering support for birth control, women's suffrage and rights (which he called for in the 1820s), against child labor, for parliamentary reform and his one-man fight to free speech. D. 1843.