The aim of FREE INQUIRY is to promote and nurture the good life — life guided by reason and science, freed from the dogmas of god and state, inspired by compassion for fellow humans, and driven by the ideals of human freedom, happiness, and understanding.
FREE INQUIRY is dedicated to seeing that one day all members of the human family thrive by embracing basic humanist principles. These include:
Our best guide to truth is free and rational inquiry; we should therefore not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy. We should defer to no dogma — neither religious nor secular — and never be afraid to ask “How do you know?”
We should be concerned with the here and now, with solving human problems with the best resources of human minds and hearts. If there is to be meaning in our lives, we must supply it ourselves, relying on our own powers, observation, and compassion. It is irrational and ultimately harmful to hang our hopes on gods, the supernatural, and the hidden, which arise out of imagination and wishful thinking. It is pointless — and often dangerous — to push aside human intelligence to reach for some flimsy veil of alleged truths.
We must be committed to moral principles, which are derived from critical intelligence and human experience, and we must pursue positive ideals. We should therefore observe the common moral decencies: integrity, humanitarianism, truthfulness, trustworthiness, fairness, and responsibility. This means caring for one another, being tolerant of differences, and striving to overcome divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, creed, or class.
Constitutional democracy is the best known means for protecting the rights of all people to form worldviews and live out their commitments in a free and mutually respectful way. Governments should promote open societies, ensure universal human rights, and be secular, having no bias against any religious or non-religious group.
Secular humanism aims to bring out the best in people so that all can achieve fullness in life. Thus we must strive to realize personal potential, maximize creative talents and artistic expression, and choose joy and hope over despair, guilt, and sin.
…Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.
—Thomas Jefferson
(Notes on the State of Virginia, vol. 8, p. 400)
Reprinted from Free Inquiry Fall 1997 Vol. 17 No. 4:- Issue 136 December 1997
