Tom Flynn (author)
| Tom Flynn | |||||
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Speaking at the 2011 Humanist Film Festival
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| Born |
August 18, 1955 Erie, Pennsylvania |
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| Residence | Buffalo, New York | ||||
| Nationality | American | ||||
| Occupation |
Director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum Editor of Free Inquiry magazine. |
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| Notable work |
The Trouble With Christmas The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief |
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| Website | CFI profile | ||||
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Director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum
Thomas W. "Tom" Flynn (born August 18, 1955) is an American author, journalist, novelist, Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and editor of its journal, Free Inquiry magazine. He is also director of the Robert Green Ingersoll Birthplace Museum and the Freethought Trail.
Much of Flynn's work addresses church-state issues, including his 1993 book The Trouble With Christmas, in connection with which he has made hundreds of radio and TV appearances in his role as the curmudgeonly "anti-Claus", calling attention to what he views as unfair treatment of the nonreligious during the year-end holiday season. He edited The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, a comprehensive reference work on the history, beliefs, and thinking of men and women who live without religion. He contributed a new Introduction to A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, by Andrew Dickson White and blogged on The Washington Post's On Faith site during 2010 and 2011. He blogs regularly on the Center for Inquiry's blog Free Thinking. He is also the author of several anti-religious black comedy science fiction novels.
In an autobiographical chapter in Flynn's 1993 The Trouble with Christmas, Flynn stated that he was born in 1955 in Erie, Pennsylvania, the only child of a moderately conservative Catholic family. He believed zealously in the teachings of the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church, beginning to question its teachings only after many church doctrines and practices were revised in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, which affected parish life when Flynn was a young adolescent. He earned his bachelor's degree at Xavier University, the Jesuit university in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the school's emphasis on philosophy and theology gave him the tools he needed to pursue his religious questions at a more serious level. Over several years of inquiry he rejected his Catholicism, then his Christianity, and ultimately his theism. Acknowledging that he had become an atheist in 1980 while residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he visited Milwaukee's downtown library, looked up "atheism" in the card catalogue, and found the so-called Dresden Edition of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll on the open stacks. Reading Ingersoll's florid Gilded Age speeches in defense of agnosticism and atheism confirmed him in his identity as an atheist and kindled his desire to become a public activist for unbelief.
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