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Quote by: Isherwood  It depends on what you mean by "thinking for yourself".
Thinking for yourself does not imply that you arrive at all your conclusions by yourself, that you don't consider anything you haven't personally investigated. It means you are willing to look at the evidence out there, the work that others have done to support their conclusions, and then decide for yourself which opinions you'll adopt. Free thinking isn't a replacement for an education. You can think for yourself and still come to amazingly illogical, unscientific, irrational and nonsensical conclusions. The best preventative for that is an exposure to as much information, pro and con, basic and advanced, as possible. The more information you've amassed to base your conclusions on the the more likely your conclusions are to be sound and supportable.
Free thinking is essentially thinking without preconceived notions or biases. It's very hard for the average human to do that perfectly. We do the best we can.
Outside religion I can see no moral aspect to free thinking. |
The more knowledge you have the better you can explain an idea or opinion you arrived at via thinking for yourself. But thinking for your self is not about adopting, stealing, or conforming to someone else's ideas, that is just copycatting. Nothing new can come from that.