Joseph L. Lewis

Joseph Lewis (June 11, 1889 - 1968) was an American freethinker and atheist who was born in Montgomery, Alabama. At the age of nine he left school to find employment and became mostly self-educated. Lewis developed his ideas from reading, among others, Robert G. Ingersoll and Thomas Paine.

In 1920, Lewis moved to New York where he became the president of Freethinkers of America (a title he would keep for the rest of his life). He later started his own publishing company, the Freethought Press Association, where he published literature about freethought written by himself and others. In the 1930s, Lewis expanded his business with a subsidiary, Eugenics Publishing Company, that published literature for common people written by medical experts about subjects such as contraception.

A bulletin, Freethinkers of America, was started by Lewis in 1937. In the 1940s it was renamed Freethinker and in the 1950s to its final name Age of Reason (named after Thomas Paine's book The Age of Reason). Contributors to the bulletin were, among others, William J. Fielding, Corliss Lamont and Franklin Steiner.

Modern Scholarship

• In Betrayal of the Innocents, Timothy Mitchell compares some of Joseph Lewis' work to Spanish antireligious publishers and writers, who were "conducting a crude deframation campaign" against Christianity and religion as a whole, to show that, during that time period, American freethinkers were not any "more balanced" than the Spanish ones. As examples, Mitchell cites Lewis' Spain, a Land Blighted by Religion, where each and every problem faced by the cities mentioned in the books is blamed on the Catholic Church, and, as an example of Lewis' credibility, quotes him as giving the estimate of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition as totalling to more than 1 million.

Bibliography

• The Tyranny of God (1921)
• Lincoln, the Freethinker (1925)
• Jefferson, the Freethinker (1925)
• The Bible Unmasked (1926)
• Franklin, the Freethinker (1926)
• Burbank, the Infidel (1929)
• Voltaire, the Incomparable Infidel (1929)
• Atheism, a collection of his public addresses (1930)
• The Bible and the Public Schools (1931)
• Should Children Receive Religious Instruction? (1933)
• The Ten Commandments (1946)
• Thomas Paine, Author of the Declaration of Independence (1947)
• In the Name of Humanity (1949)
• An Atheist Manifesto (1954)
• Ingersoll, The Magnificent (1957)

References

• "Freethought of the Day". Freedom From Religion Foundation.. http://www.ffrf.org/day/?sel=1&day=11&month=6. Retrieved January 23, 2006. 
• "Lewis, Joseph". About, Inc.,. http://atheism.about.com/library/glossary/general/bldef_lewisjoseph.htm. Retrieved January 23, 2006. 

External links

• Works by Joseph Lewis at Project Gutenberg