There are 4 freethought birthdays today, listed below in order of birth: Edward Gibbon, Mary Wollstonecraft, Herbert Spencer and Ulysses S. Grant.

On this date in 1737, Edward Gibbon was born in England. The historian's most famous work is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which appeared originally in six volumes from 1776 through 1788. Oxford-educated, Gibbon represented Lymington in Parliament for many years. Gibbon was a highly skeptical and unreligious Deist, who was particularly critical of the history of the Roman Catholic Church. The "melancholy duty" of the historian, he wrote in his treatise, is to discover "the inevitable mixture of error and corruption" of religion. Chapter XV of Decline and Fall contains Gibbon's famous explication of early Christianity. He observed, "it was not in this world that the primitive Christians were desirous of making themselves either agreeable or useful."

Gibbon believed that Christianity introduced a new and negative element into religion in damning those who would not accept Christian teachings. "These rigid sentiments, which had been unknown to the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony. The ties of blood and friendship were frequently torn asunder by the difference of religious faith; and the Christians, who, in this world, found themselves oppressed by the power of the Pagans, were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph." Gibbon wrote several other major histories. D. 1794.

On this date in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London, the second of seven children. The industrious young woman worked as a companion, governess and then opened her own school. Her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, was published in 1786, followed by a novel, a children's book (re-issued with illustrations by William Blake), a translation, and The Female Reader. When Edmund Burke read her review of a sermon by dissenting minister Richard Price, he wrote a famous attack on the American and French Revolutions. Mary was the first to rebut his polemic. A Vindication of the Rights of Men was published five weeks later, rejecting all arguments from authority or precedent. Her seminal A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. The first influential book calling for the equality of the sexes, it urged that women be educated and treated as "rational creatures." Wollstonecraft championed dress reform, breast-feeding, early education and a national system of coeducational primary schools. She warned of those who practice "on the credulity of women."

She gave birth to a daughter in an unhappy liaison with Gilbert Imlay, then married atheist William Godwin in 1797. Following an uneventful pregnancy, 38-year-old Mary gave birth to a second daughter, Mary. The new mother died of a childbirth infection after ten intense days of suffering. Her daughter Mary ran off as a teenager with poet Percy Shelley, and wrote Frankenstein at age 19. Wollstonecraft was an ardent rationalist and Deist who adopted an agnostic point of view toward the end of her life. D. 1797.

On this date in 1820, Herbert Spencer was born in England. The agnostic philosopher was educated in engineering, but worked as a journalist and writer. Spencer became good friends with leading thinkers and writers, such as Thomas Huxley and novelist George Eliot. His Principles of Psychology was published in 1855, followed by a series of major works on the principles of biology, sociology, education and ethics. Spencer, in Social Statics, (1850) wrote: "Whatever fosters militarism makes for barbarism; whatever fosters peace makes for civilization." D. 1903.

On this date in 1822, Ulysses S. Grant, 18th president of the United States, was born in Ohio. The Union victory at the end of the Civil War was credited to Grant, who became General of the Army. Grant was U.S. president from 1869 to 1877. He was a favorite of irreverent author Mark Twain, who gave the keynote at a toast for Grant at the Palmer House in Chicago in 1879, as part of an illustrious line-up of speakers that included agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll. Twain was entrusted to publish Grant's Memoirs. Grant was not a member of any church, and was never baptized. After receiving eight demerits as a cadet at West Point for failure to attend chapel, he protested in a letter that it was "not republican" to be forced to go to church (Brown's Life of Grant, p. 329, cited by Franklin Steiner, The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents). Grant was on record in favor of taxation of church property. In an annual address to Congress in 1875, he warned of "the importance of correcting an evil that if permitted to continue, will probably lead to great trouble in our land . . . It is the acquisition of vast amounts of untaxed Church property. . . I would suggest the taxation of all property equally." D. 1885.