Some of today's beliefs will be swept away for better ideas tomorrow just as some of yesterday's ideas have been replaced by today's knowledge. Nevertheless, it remains a fact that no convincing evidence supports the existence of the supernatural. Nor does our ignorance about very many things demand that we believe in the supernatural. Freethinkers believe in the sort of human understanding that naturally follows from a careful and rational consideration of the relevant factual evidence. With regard to the natural world of human experience, therefore, freethinkers regard the scientific method as the proper approach and scientific knowledge as the most reliable sort of human understanding.
Freethinkers also acknowledge that there is an inner, private, subjective world of human experience.
But they also recognize that our feelings and emotions cannot and should not be the basis of what we believe about the reality of the world which all human beings share. Freethinkers believe that morality, like all other human understanding, arises out of the nature of reality as best we can understand it. Currently, our best knowledge, for example, is that the many differences between human beings which were once thought to be important, including skin color and other racial characteristics, gender, breeding, and so forth, are trivial matters compared to our essential similarities. Freethinkers believe that human behavior should be guided by this simple understanding of the moral equivalence of one person to another, which plainly puts such things as robbery, rape, murder, fraud, and otherwise endangering the lives and health of others into the category of wrongs. Thus, freethinkers take something like the ancient Golden Rule as drawing its authority from the nature of objective reality.