What is Freethought Church?
"To promote and advance, as a moral imperative, the unfettered power of thought over belief, of reason over faith, of facts over revelation and superstition, and of knowledge over dogmas and doctrines, especially in matters of religion and religious opinion. In so doing, the NTCOF intends to safeguard these important elements of human interest and experience from the stranglehold of tradition, the dangers of authority, and the unthinking grasp of established belief, as well as from the prejudices and intolerances engendered by them, in order to address the human need for understanding within both the categories of public, social, and objective truth, and of personal, individual, and subjective insight and self discovery."
These are broad terms. In practice, what we do tends to fit into three basic categories:
Education:
Like all churches, we have a message. But most people, even nontheists, know a lot less about the message of Freethought than about that of the traditional faith-based churches, especially Christianity, the most prevalent religion in America. There is a desperate need for the message of Freethought to be preached, heard, and understood. Our goal is to fill this need, especially through our regular monthly services which have been free and open to the public since February of 1995. Articles on this website, most of them from our services over the years, supplement this mission. And we also gladly make available speakers for other groups wishing to know more about us and our rational approach to religious questions.
Community:
Human beings are social animals. It's just a fact. Most of us belong to families related by kinship and we all live in larger communities as well. Churches are a unit of social organization intermediate betwen that of the family and the larger community. Their basis is that of shared values relating to personal needs, interests, talents and ambitions. That's what makes churches different from various "cause" organizations including those that focus on supporting state-church separation or opposing what they consider to be the harmful effects of religious dogmatism and extremism. The NTCOF has brought together people who have married and had children and others who found valuable and life-long friendships. People relating to others is a good thing, even for unbelievers - especially for unbelievers!
Charity:
Just as individuals fit into families, churches fit into the larger community and we, like most other churches, would like to do so in helpful and caring ways. Although we are not large enough (yet!) to sponsor ambitious charitable projects, we are committed to doing what we can to help others in our church and in the larger community. Religions justify this in different ways. For example, some of them say that their deity "told them to do it." Our attitude is that we human beings should help each other because there are no deities we can look to for help. If we don't do it, no one will.
What is Our History?
Freethought had its beginning when people first began to doubt and question. Because Freethought is all about understanding ourselves and our world through a process of trial and error using the tools of facts and reason. Many hundreds of years before Christianity got its start, people like Socrates (shown left) had the audacity to ask, for example, whether what is good is loved by god(s) because it is good or whether it is good because it is loved by god(s). A hundred years before the events claimed to have happened in the New Testament, the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius argued that the world was entirely explicable by natural means. And many others in ancient times noted the logical absurdity of the idea that an all-powerful deity could also be all-good.
Freethinkers recognize October 12, 1692 as "Freethought Day," a watershed in history when Governor William Phips of the then-colony Massachusetts issued an official edict announcing that the Salem witch trials would no longer accept "spectral" or supernatural evidence that was being offered to support accusations against women and men in Salem. Up until this date, the citizens of Salem were paralyzed by an escalating fit of irrationality and superstition. Although the trials began when a few young girls let their imaginations get the better of them, and began declaring a few marginalized citizens to be practicing witches, the superstitious fervor expanded until even the Governor's wife was accused of witchcraft. At this point, Governor Phips declared that superstitious beliefs were no longer sufficient to legally accuse a fellow citizen of a crime.
As Church of Freethought Founder and Pastor Dr. Tim Gorski observed:
"Now this is the important part: why did [Phips] do it? Was [he] a Freethinker? No. Was it that people suddenly realized that there are no witches, no demons, no evil spells and the like? No. No, the Phips Edict came about with the complicity of all the devout fundamentalist believers that constituted the community of Salem and the Colony of Massachusetts because they had to.
Winston Churchill once remarked that 'What the wise do in the beginning, fools do in the end.' Churchill also said that 'You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else!'
For, you see, eventually, at some point, and to some degree, people simply have to act rationally. You have to open doors before walking through doorways. You have to turn the key in your ignition before you drive home today. No amount of faith and prayer can allow anyone to do otherwise. And despite all the rhetorical flourishes of the superstitious believers, that's the way it's always been and always will be.
Indeed, this truth is becoming more and more important every day. It's also the essence of the role of the law: to hold people to a standard of dealing with one another that's based on reason. That's the basis of every shall and shalt not that there is, not some divine command of 'do it or else.'"
Where Did The NTCOF Come From?
The Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex may seem to be an odd choice to found the first-ever "Church of Freethought," but Texas in the 19th century was home to a great number of German Freethinkers who settled in and around the South-central hill country. Many of their settlements exist even today, including Millheim, Sisterdale, and Comfort. Texas was an attractive home to these early Freethinkers because of its strong commitment to individual liberty, and the economic opportunities it offered.
A similar attraction brought Dr. Tim Gorski, Mike Sullivan, and their wives to the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, which is currently a bustling cosmopolitan center of approximately six million, attracting hundreds of fantastic new people every day. Tim and Mike had both been raised to accept the rule of tradition and superstition as children, but had since grown up and out of the restricting systems of faith-based religion. Finding great value in the disciplines of Freethought, scientific skepticism, and philosophy, Mike and Tim independently tried to find a home in the few secular organizations that were available at the time. Happily, these investigations brought them into contact with each other, where they discovered a shared commitment to Freethought, but also a shared desire to find a place where the social and emotional needs of those who reject superstitious religions could still be satisfied. The need for such an organization was particularly apparent when Tim and his wife Deborah began to raise a family, and wanted an environment in which their childrens' moral and intellectual development could be supported.
Where Is The NTCOF Now?
The NTCOF currently enjoys a membership of between 200-300 individuals, with between 75-100 in attendance at monthly services. Monthly services are held on the first Sunday of every month at the Sheraton Grand, and other social events are held at various locations throughout the DFW metroplex. To date, the contributions of the NTCOF family has been substantial, and have continually enhanced the NTCOF's mission and goals. It goes without saying that an organization as robust and dynamic as the NTCOF could not possibly sustain itself without the generous support of its members, both in volunteerism and financial support. Join us in this unique and vital endeavor to advance rationalism in religion!
What are Our Values?
Polls consistently show that some 10% of Americans - tens of millions of people - don't feel an affinity for any of the traditional faith-based religious denominations. Yet they have the same social, emotional, and other "spiritual" needs as everyone else. And they are also deeply concerned with such important principles as justice, honesty, right living, and the promotion of these values in the larger society. But the great majority of unbelievers have found it difficult to reconcile their views on these important subjects and their knowledge of the natural world with what nearly all religious organizations expect their members to believe on faith. Whether they think of themselves as atheists, agnostics, humanists, doubters, skeptics, freethinkers, or something else, these individuals have found themselves excluded from traditional church life in America.
As a result, many have felt isolated and unsupported in their conscientious inability to accept belief in the supernatural. Meanwhile, the faith-based churches have enjoyed a near-monopoly in providing their members with a sense of community, a ready source of personal, emotional, and social enrichment and support and representation of their views and values in the larger society. Up until now, unbelievers have had little choice but to remain alone and isolated. A few have chosen to compromise their principles, convincing themselves that their honest doubts just aren't that important. Sadly, many of these people are individuals and couples with children who have been made to feel that religious indoctrination is somehow necessary to the moral development of their offspring.
To some who are without belief in the supernatural, "church" and "religion" are intellectually indigestible, terms that are too closely associated with what they have been unable to honestly accept. It is the position of The North Texas Church of Freethought that this is an unnecessary handicap. A church is merely a group of individuals and families among whom there is a consensus about "religious questions" and the relationship of human beings to one another and to the larger world.
Freethinkers simply hold that the world outside of human thought, feeling, and imagination is best known through the tools of evidence and reason. Similarly, religion is no more than an assembly of beliefs, attitudes, feelings, and behaviors with which people relate to one another and the universe. Freethinkers simply cannot find a place for the supernatural in any of these things.
Belief in the supernatural, belief based on faith, belief as a choice (instead of the natural result of reason and evidence) and/or belief as a measure of one's self-worth or moral status: these are the things that most people who are unchurched find hard to swallow. These indigestible religious "bones" are what The North Texas Church of Freethought has dispensed with. We explicitly reject such doctrines and teachings as being incompatible with the highest ideals of good to which human beings can aspire: honesty, integrity, intelligence, insight, creativity, and compassion and respect for others, to name the most important
Our values, then, can be described in the following way: