What's God Got to Do with it? Robert Ingersoll on Free Though... by Robert G. Ingersoll

I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the great and good are dead, that the living are totally depraved, that all pleasures are sins, that sighs and groans are alone pleasing to God, that thought is dangerous, that intellectual courage is a crime, that cowardice is a virtue, that a certain belief is necessary to secure salvation (13). Presidency: “I would much prefer to hear Moses on ‘The mistakes of Ingersoll.’” Ingersoll opened his noxious tirade as follows: Each time I see it I cannot but be reminded of the quip by William Jennings Bryan, five-time Democratic nominee for the U.S. I have long had in my library a copy of Ingersoll’s pathetic little volume, Some Mistakes of Moses (1879). Literally speaking, he said, he was agnostic regarding the immortality of the soul. When adversaries confronted him with the implications of this expression of hope, he rationalized by suggesting that his words were simply spontaneous eruptions of affection. But in the night of Death, Hope sees a star, and listening Love can hear the rustle of a wing (Farrell, 12:391). From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word. We cry aloud-and the only murmur is the echo of our wailing cry. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. What was the basis for such hope? In a eulogy delivered at the funeral of his beloved brother, Ingersoll poured out his soul in anguish. Once when asked to deliver an address at a little boy’s grave, the infidel said: “We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living, hope for the dead.” Strangely, though, the “hope” jargon occasionally wormed its way into his vocabulary. When Ingersoll turned against the Bible (he had been raised in a religious home), he abandoned any hope of eternal bliss. He charged that the Scriptures contain “a great deal of error, considerable barbarism and a most plentiful lack of good sense” (Farrell 1900, 8:1).

He crisscrossed the nation lecturing to large crowds with vitriolic tirades against the Bible. Robert Ingersoll (1833-99) was a mediocre Illinois lawyer whose flair for oratory thrust him into fame in the latter portion of the nineteenth century.

What's God Got to Do with it? Robert Ingersoll on Free Though... by Robert G. Ingersoll