Well, Bill, my feeling is that a freethinker is someone who draws his own conclusions rather than letting his parents, his teachers, his government, his church, his society or his peer group do his thinking for him.

All freethinkers won't necessarily come to the same conclusions, but at least they'll honestly come to their own conclusions rather than just adopting someone else's.


Mrrzy - The interesting thing about the "supernatural" is this: it isn't really supernatural, in my opinion. It's just quite unusual in terms of our common experience. That doesn't make it supernatural, because it's surely just as natural as other things are....just very rarely seen, that's all.

Example: electric lights and firearms and radio transmissions all seemed supernatural to natives who'd never experienced them before. Why? Unfamiliarity. The very unusual is often interpreted as "supernatural" by awestruck people, but after some familiarity builds up with it, then they decide it's not supernatural after all, and they just take it for granted after awhile.

I know you already think you can divide things up into the "real" and the "unreal"....so you wouldn't for example countenance the idea of Angels being real, would you? Not for a moment. But that's for just one simple reason: You haven't seen any Angels yet. So you assume they can't possibly be real. If you did see an Angel, you'd have a very hard time maintaining that assumption.

But in the meantime, you can easily discount any story from someone else who says they saw an Angel. You can just dismiss it, saying that they must have had a hallucination or made some kind of mistake.

This is how the country farmer in 1810 dismissed the guy who told him about seeing a giraffe at the zoo in New York. He'd never seen one himself, and none of his friends had either, so he knew it must be a lie! Or a delusion. ;-)