On this date in 1850, atheist activist George William Foote was born in England. In 1876 he began co-editing a weekly newspaper, The Secularist, with Jacob Holyoake, then became the first editor of the National Secular Society’s publication The Freethinker. Foote edited The Freethinker for 35 years. The magazine is still published but moved to online-only in 2014.
Foote was prosecuted for blasphemy in 1882 and jailed for a year. His plight brought reform, making future criticism of Christianity lawful in Great Britain. Foote launched several other freethought journals, publishing companies and presses, devoting his life and career to the advancement of secularism.
Foote’s “Flowers of Freethought,” published in 1894, is a collection of articles tackling a variety of then-contemporary freethought issues such as the Christian role in sanctifying slavery. Foote observes in his chapter “Are Atheists Wicked?” that “One of the most effective arts of priestcraft has been the misrepresentation and slander of heretics.”
Foote’s “The Bible Handbook: For Freethinkers and Inquiring Christians” with co-author W.P. Ball stayed in print for years and analyzed bible contradictions, atrocities and absurdities. In its preface, Foote wrote that they looked at the worst things in the bible, not the best, only because “the Bible is not an ordinary book. It is stamped as God’s Word by Act of Parliament; it is forced into the hands of children in our private and public schools; it is used as a kind of fetish for swearing upon in our Courts of Law and our Houses of Legislation. … Men are still liable, at law, to imprisonment for bringing it into ‘disbelief and contempt.’ ” (D. 1915)
