Freethought of the Day

Thomas Hobbes April 5 On this date in 1588, Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely  on "Good Friday" in England, his birth precipitated by his  mother's fear of the invasion of the Spanish Armada.  Thomas was the precocious son of a ne'er-do-well parson.  As a tutor, Hobbes made the "Grand Tour" of Europe three  times, once meeting Galileo. Contemporary  John Aubrey described Hobbes as "contemplative," and charitable, always carrying a pen and ink-horn in his cane,  with a notebook handy so he could jot down ideas during  daily constitutionals. Aubrey noted that Hobbes once wrote  a poem in Latin hexameter and pentameter "on the encroachments of the clergy on the civil power," which contained over 500 verses. De Cive was published in 1642, and Leviathan in 1651, in which Hobbes proposed the idea  that a "social contract" was necessary for civil peace. Its analysis of religion brought charges of atheism, then punishable by death. When things got too hot in England after Leviathan, Hobbes repaired to Paris. After the Great Plague in 1665 was followed by the Great Fire the next year, religionists sought a scapegoat. Parliament once more targeted Leviathan for being heresy. Hobbes hastily burned many of his papers. His writing helped give birth to the Enlightenment, by analyzing and questioning religious assumptions, and proposing that religion was created by humans. Hobbes attributed "opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion; which, by reason of the different fancies, judgements, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different that those which are used by one man are for the most part ridiculous to the other." Whether Deist, or covert atheist, Hobbes was anti-clerical, anti-Puritan and anti-Catholic, and managed to live out his full 91 years in perilous times due to influential friends. D. 1679. “Seeing there are no signs nor fruit of religion but in man only, there is no cause to doubt but that the seed of religion is also only in man. . .”  “Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION.”  “They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that mislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion.” Compiled by Eleanor Wroblewski