Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

Pointing and laughing at religious lunacy for more than half-a-century

The Freethinker — ‘The Voice of Atheism since 1881’ — is heading towards extinction

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IN preparing a press statement to accompany the release on Amazon today of my memoir —Well, Goodness, Godless Me – A Romp Through the Life (So Far) of a Rebellious Gay Atheist  —  I discovered that The Freethinker, which sacked me four years ago, has completely collapsed in all but name.

Before, and especially during Covid, the FT, founded in 1881 by G.W. Foote, attracted thousands of visitors a day when it went solely online in 2014.

Then the unthinkable happened. The publishers decided to “repurpose” the publication. This involved trashing Foote’s primary aim of being an “anti-Christian organ” that would “wage a relentless war against superstition”.

In March, 2022, the publishers raised a white flag to indicate their cowardly retreat from Foote’s battle — waged for over 141 years — gave me the boot in a reprehensible manner and created a lamentable, vaguely humanistic website with an awful masthead featuring a childish cartoon of a pig with a human face.

The result? An unappealing site crammed with wishy-washy pseudo-intellectual flimflam and transphobic content!

When it replaced my concise, well-illustrated and often ferocious daily religious news reports with timid waffle the publishers immediately saw their readership numbers nose-dive to fewer than 20 hits a day.

Thousands of readers, appalled by my abrupt departure and the betrayal of Foote’s principles, immediately abandoned the site which is now struggling to stay afloat.

When I was editing the site, updating it daily, seven days a week, it was attracting around 6,000 hits a day, sometimes rising up to 20,000. It became one of the world’s most popular atheist sites, alongside Hermant Mehta’s The Friendly Atheist which now has more than 22,000 subscribers, and around 162,000 visits a month!

Today, The Freethinker is lucky to get around 17 visitors a day! (Source: Linkatomic.)

The publishers were asked to confirm or deny these statistics, but chose to ignore my request.

In the first month of The Freethinker’s appearance on Patheos about a decade ago it proved an immediate success, prompting the then-head of Patheos Nonreligious, Dale McGowan, to say how amazed he was at how quickly the FT had gained traction on the platform. He wrote, “Your performance is EXCEPTIONAL — very high quality and consistency. It is almost unheard of to have a blog break through 100K views in its first full month!

The Freethinker is now #8 in the Nonreligious Channel (out of about 35 active blogs) and #15 on the entire site. (out of about 300). This is not at all normal for a new Patheos blog, and I’m just delighted.

Loyal followers of the old site were appalled by what they saw as the complete abandonment of G W Foote’s principles, and hundreds expressed their fury over the lies that were told regarding my departure. The devious publishers of the FT even went as far as to tamper with my Wiki, entry, saying that I had “chosen” to leave the role.

Mehta told me last week:

I guess it’s fair to say The Freethinker has not been on my radar for a while when I’m looking through news stories. Or at least it never pops up as a source for stories like they did when you were writing there!

For decades, I conscientiously followed the path that Foote — jailed for a year with hard labour for blasphemy — so courageously carved out for the editors and writers that succeeded him. Every day, without a break, I used the FT to attack, with both humour and vitriol, religion in all its many guises, much to the satifaction of the fast-growing numbers of readers who shared my contempt for the cruelty, dishonesty and stupidity of lying, perverted faith leaders and their foolish followers.  

I said in my release sent to secular and religious websites and bloggers around the world:

The new FT site exposes the utterly cluelessness of the publishers who have demonstrated that they know absolutely nothing about effective website content. People today have extremely short attention spans, and simply will not plough through rambling commentaries that the site now infrequently publishes — fewer than 15 posts a month.

I added:

Another important indication a site’s performance is the amount of comments each post attracts. When I was editor comments were pouring in daily, and I would be moderating dozens until 4 am each day. In July this year the current FT published a derisory 11 yawn-inducing pieces that attracted a total of ten comments. A month before, its second replacement editor in three years — Daniel James Sharp — published just 13 tedious articles. These attracted a total of 11 comments. May was no better. Eleven posts attracted just one comment. This clear absence of engagement indicates just how badly the site is performing.

I also pointed out:

I am willing to bet Sharp earns a great more than the slavery wage I was paid by the skinflint publishers (just over £5 an hour) for working 12 hours a day for seven years. My fee should have been commensurate with the backbreaking work I was doing and money I was generating for the FT — I estimate more than £30,000 — in the form of generous donations and bequests from appreciative readers. The best thing the publishers should do now is shut down this travesty of site, a gross insult to the memory of Foote, and donate its assets of more than £600,000 to the Palestinians or Ukraine. Yet these money-grubbing amateurs still have the gall to continue to beg for more cash to keep the FT on life support when it’s clearly teetering at the edge of oblivion.

From its site comes this: “If you would like The Freethinker to be around in another 140 years, please leave us something in your will.”

Another 140 years? Their cartoon pig will sprout wings and take flight if, at this rate, it last another 140 months.

Incidentally, the world’s oldest atheist magazine, The Truth Seeker, founded in 1873 by D. M. Bennett and his wife Mary Wicks Bennett, continues to thrive under the editorship of Roderick Bradford.

You can help me recoup some of the costs involved in getting my book published by making a small donation here.

Well, Goodness, Godless Me is much more than a tragic taIe of a venerable publication that lost its purpose, and how a burning ambition was realised and then ultimately dashed on the rocks of political correctness. Only the penultimate chapter deals in detail with the lies and deception surrounding my sacking.

Instead, it’s a story told, in an oft-amusing manner, of my coming out as gay teen and an aggressive atheist in a tyrannical Calvinist Christian country, South Africa.

In my memoir I describe my frequent clashes with the authorities for opposing state-imposed racism and censorship. My defiance and insubordination ultimately led to my fleeing the country in 1973 when it became apparent that the authorities were intent on arresting me for my involvement with banned African National Congress members and the irreligious and anti-censorship articles I wrote. A year later I was given refugee status in the UK.

Before my speedy departure from South Africa, with the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) hot on my heels, I narrowly escaped a rampaging baboon and lynch mob of neo-Nazis; luckily avoided conversion therapy intended to turn me “straight”; was banned from covering events staged by the South African military, befriended Nelson Mandela’s wife Winnie when the president-to-be was serving a life sentence, and, in my final year in college, took part in riot that completely totally destroyed a bar that was hosting a celebration of Hitler’s birthday.

Aged just 15, I destroyed an enormous Bible used by a racist Dutch Reformed Church priest to smash the nose of an African youth. A year later I was expelled from high school for writing “seditious” anti-Apartheid and atheist essays.

I also defied the regime’s draconian censorship laws by disseminating banned films and publications, including The Freethinker and Ray Bradbury’s acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 among my fellow freethinkers, and holding up to ridicule the decisions made by the Apartheid state’s Publications Control Board in searing reports I wrote after embarking on my journalistic career.

Upon gaining safety in the UK, in 1998, I realised my lifelong ambition to become editor of The Freethinker.

I continued campaigning against Apartheid in the UK, but on discovering how homophobic, racist and xenophobic British society was in the 1970s — and sadly has become so again — I added gay liberation to my campaigning work, and became a founding member of the ground-breaking Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) along with my late partner, Brian Parry.

I also strongly advocated for the decriminalisation of cannabis — indeed all recreational drugs — voluntary euthanasia, and the abolition of the blasphemy law.

In 1981 I was arrested in the United Nations Building in New York for plastering stickers, bearing an image of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, with the words “Religion Kills.” I was declared an “undesirable alien” by the authorities and told never to re-enter the US.

It was with considerable pride that I received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Secular Society, of which I was a member for many years in 2017.

In the same year I married my partner of almost 30 years, Marcus Robinson, in Gibraltar.

New life in progressive Spain

We left our home in the very godless coastal city of Brighton to begin a new life in Spain in 2010, and a year later I became involved in organising Benidorm’s first LGBTQ+ Pride event, which today attracts more than 20,000 people to the city. For several years, I acted as Pride’s official photographer, but had to lay my camera aside when I began losing my sight to glaucoma and cataracts.

In my memoir, I write extensively about life in Spain, marvelling at its rapid retreat from fascism. It has completely broken the stranglehold the Catholic Church once had on politics, and, via successive progressive socialist administrations, has introduced social reforms that have made the country an extremely civilised, polite and extremely well-educated liberal democracy where anti-social behaviour is a rarity, not a norm as it is in broken Britain and the U.S. which are both experiencing a total collapse of social cohesion and civilised discourse.

Spain is now in the top 10 percent of the safest countries in the world — especially for its LGBTQ+ communities. It was one of the first countries to legalise same-sex marriage in 2005. And in 2021 it defied strong opposition from the Catholic Church legalised euthansia.

As far back as 2013, a study conducted by the Pew Research Center indicated that more than 88 percent of Spanish citizens accepted homosexuality, making Spain the most LGBTQ-friendly of 39 countries polled.

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Barry Duke

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6 responses to “The Freethinker — ‘The Voice of Atheism since 1881’ — is heading towards extinction”

  1. malcolmjdodd Avatar
    malcolmjdodd

    I unsubscribed from Freethinker over a year ago, that says it all about the drab, insignificant blog that it had become without Barry.

    Like

    Reply
  2. Broga Avatar
    Broga

    You were not only sacked in the most contemptible of ways, Barry, but the rest of us who loyally and happily read you were assumed to be such suckers that we would read the vapid crap that followed.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  3. stephenharvie Avatar
    stephenharvie

    I, as I imagine most former readers of The Freethinker were, was appalled at how shamefully you were treated and stopped reading it out of loyalty. The fact that the rag has become unreadable and insignificant without you at the helm is not lost upon the community.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  4. Broga Avatar
    Broga

    I don’t think anything can be done to stop devout Christians from being conned by their preachers. Wave the magic words, quote bits of the bible and they can’t wait to be robbed. I don’t, in my experience, think the problem is the same in the UK, The suckers appear to be mostly simplistic Americans. But my experience is very limited.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  5. Bob Hutton Avatar
    Bob Hutton

    So, the FT is extinct. When we die we don’t face extinction, we face eternal conscious existence, either blessing in Heaven, or torments in Hell.

    Like

    Reply
    1. malcolmjdodd Avatar
      malcolmjdodd

      Knowing that you will not be there, makes me grateful for the knowledge that I will be in a comfortable air-conditioned hell whilst you are freezing at temperature -270C.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

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