Major Crimes and True Crime

Thomas Aikenhead was most ahead of their time In 1697, a young Scottish student named Thomas Aikenhead made some rather shocking statements. Statements that, at the time, did not go over well at all. It wasn’t Aikenhead’s intention to shock people, mind you — he merely got drawn into an argument with fellow students at the University of Edinburgh. The discussion was one of a philosophical and religious nature. Some of Aikenhead’s fellow students were shocked by his irreligious stance. They reported him to the authorities for blasphemy. Here is the indictment, summing up what the young Scottish student said: The prisoner had repeatedly maintained, in conversation, that theology was a rhapsody of ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrines of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras: That he ridiculed the holy scriptures, calling the Old Testament Ezra's fables, in profane allusion to Esop's Fables; That he railed ...