Review
From the Back Cover
Once the specific evidence is brought to our attention we can, with the gift of hindsight, perceive the importance of those thinkers who moved bravely against the current of their time. In those times, sad to say, they often paid dearly for taking advantage of that freedom of thought and expression that are so honored by the rest of us, at least as abstractions.
Gerald Larue has produced a volume that can enlighten everyone, believers as well as non-believers."
--Steve Allen, author, comedian and composer
"Dr. Gerald Larue's book, Freethought Across the Centuries, is an adventure epic of human mortals struggling to increase their liberty, including the freedom to think creatively and critically. It is also the account of tyrants and others whose fear of freedom of thought led them to employ violent tactics of repression.
In fascinating chapters, Larue demonstrates that many cultural streams around the world have fed into the vast river of freethought. As an author, he belongs to the noble tradition of humanists who find human heroism behind views and traditions sharply different from their own.
His book shows in detail how we as a species have struggled to solve problems and to make sense of the universe that gave us birth. Upon reading the closing chapter, we cannot help feeling deeper kinship with fellow humans who lived before us.
Larue helps us understand that ours is the responsibility of conserving, generously transmitting, and perhaps rectifying the vast heritage into which we have all in various ways been immersed and by which we have been made into a fearsome and wondrous species."
--Joseph E. Barnhart, philosophy professor, North Texas State University
"In Freethought Across the Centuries, Gerald Larue knocks religion off its pedestal and places it squarely into the arena of inquiry. Larue presents rational skeptics throughout history who questioned and criticized religious dogma and who often died because they questioned.
The book reminds us that, if we fail to question religion as we question all other fields of human knowledge, then we risk forfeiting the sacred balance between church and state.
I urge educators in all disciplines to read Professor Larue's book, to bring its resources into their classroom."
--Lena Ksargian, University of Chicago
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
