Robert Owen

From Philosopedia

Owen, Robert (14 May 1771 - 17 November 1858)

Finding that no religion is based on facts and cannot therefore be true, I began to reflect what must be the condition of mankind trained from infancy to believe in errors.

Evidences of Christianity: A Debate with Alexander Campbell and Robert Owen

Owen, a Scot who had owned a cotton-spinning mill, moved to Indiana, where he started a socialist experiment in New Harmony. His “Declaration of Mental Independence,” delivered on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, is found in Whitehead and Muhrer’s Freethought on the American Frontier. Two of his works were Debate on the Evidence of Christianity (1829) and Threading My Way: Twenty-seven Years of Autobiography (1874).

Phyllis Palmer in the Encyclopedia of Unbelief notes that “he was not a caricature philanthropist devoted more to an idea than to actual people” and “he could not accept religious tenets that rationalized poor planning and justified the poverty that accompanied early industrialization.” Joseph McCabe wrote that Owen believed that “man’s character is made for him and not by him” and that “all the religions of the world are false.”

For a time he had the Royal family among his public supporters, but religious opponents forced him into a public declaration of atheism. He then founded a movement known as Socialism (not State Socialism) and later an ethical movement which he called Rational Religion. The latter had 100,000 members, who may or may not have been agnostics, and in the trade unions he is said to have had influence over more than a million. In his Autobiography, Owen found that “one and all had emanated from the same source, and their varieties from the same false imaginations of our early ancestors.”

J. M. Robertson admired him because “from an early age he had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion. . . . He had come to his rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire; and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism—of all ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct—with a thoroughness of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable.” Owen during a debate on religion once said,

• When we use the term Lord, God, or Deity we use a term without annexing to it any definite idea.” Further, he said, “All the religions of the world are false.”

Owen was a member of the British Humanist Association.

Somehow, when he was eighty-four and his mind was failing, Owen was duped by a spiritualist medium, who convinced him that spirit communication represented “a great moral evolution . . . about to be effected for the human race,” and spiritualist socialism, a kind of “socialism of eternity.” Wheeler says of Owen that he “profoundly influenced the thought of his time in the direction of social amelioration, and he is justly respected for his energy, integrity, and disinterested philanthropy.”

At the age of eighty-eight, Owen died. His son, Robert Dale Owen, was quoted as follows in the newspapers, which noted that Owen’s name had at one time been a terror to the clergy and to the privileged classes:

• My dear father passed away this morning, at a quarter before seven, and passed away as gently and quietly as if he had fallen asleep. There was not the least struggle, not a contraction of a limb, of a muscle, not an expression of pain on his face. His breathing gradually became slower and slower, until at last it ceased so unperceptibly, that, even as I held his hand, I could scarcely tell the moment when he no longer breathed. His last words distinctly pronounced about twenty minutes before his death, were ‘Relief has come.’ About half an hour before he said , ‘Very easy and comfortable.’”

Owen’s remains were interred in the churchyard of St. Mary’s, Newtown. Inasmuch as the law allowed the minister had a right to read the Church of England burial service over the heretic’s coffin, according to George William Foote, the Freethinkers who stood round the grave had to bear the mockery as quietly as possible.

{BDF; CE; EU, Phyllis Palmer; FUK; FU; JM; PUT; RAT; RE; VI; TRI}